Brightness Falls (57 page)

Something must have been wrong with his delivery, when he tossed it off that night, because she was silent on the other end of the phone, on the other side of the continent.

"Hello, are you there? Tune in, Rangoon."

"I'm here," she said.

"Is it cold there? I feel a certain chill coming over the wire."

"I just don't feel like hearing about what a wonderful time you're having with all the beautiful and famous people."

When Russell explained that he had dropped the name tongue in cheek, she laughed bitterly.

"It's even worse when you name-drop and then pretend you're not."

Feeling the justice of her charge, he curtly said good night.

The next night she called back and apologized. "Oh, Russell, how did it ever come down to this?"

"I don't know," he said grimly. "I want us to be together again."

"We will be," he said, not knowing exactly why he said it, except to comfort her. Having both expressed this vague desire, they left the details hanging.

One evening, among the messages the desk clerk had given him, Russell found a note that read:
I'm in room
34.
Please call.
—
Blazes Boylan.
Upstairs in his own room, Russell's eyes moved between the television news and the telephone. He and Zac had a dinner date at The Ivy with a VP of production. He was gathering his things, searching for his keys, when someone knocked.

They stood in the doorway, looking each other over, Russell taken aback at Jeff's appearance, the way his skin seemed to hang on his frame like his clothes. "You want to come in?"

Jeff glanced around the suite, coughing into his hand. "I think I had this room once." He looked up. "The ceiling definitely seems familiar. You going somewhere?"

"Dinner."

Jeff nodded, weighing this information. "I came out here to see you. That's why I'm here. I wanted to talk."

Russell checked his watch. "I've got a few minutes."

"I might need longer than that."

"For someone who's supposed to have kicked his bad habits you don't look very healthy. " Jeff was skinnier than ever, his skin as chalky as it had ever been in his downtown days.

"You, on the other hand, look like a fucking surfer."

Russell called the restaurant and left a message for Zac saying that he would not be able to make it. He would think of the excuse later. Death in the family, dog ate the homework.

"You want to get a drink," he asked, before he remembered. "Sorry, force of habit."

"Actually," said Jeff, "I do."

They drove out to the Santa Monica beach, where the sun was just beginning to drop over the steely convexity of the ocean toward Asia, and sat down in the sand twenty yards from the surf. A large, intelligent-looking sea gull circled and landed a few yards away, swaying back and forth on its thin legs like a man standing on the deck of a wave-tossed ship, facing off at an angle away from them as if to convey the idea that it was in the neighborhood on other business but would be happy to accept a dinner invitation.

Jeff winked at the sea gull, then gazed out over the water. Detaching a can of beer from a six-pack, he opened his mouth to speak, faltered and sighed.

"The writer at a loss for words," he mused. "Sometimes I think words are like girlfriends—can't find a good one to save your life when you're actually looking, but when you don't need any they're falling out of the goddamned trees."

Suddenly he appeared self-conscious, as if in alluding to
amour
he had glimpsed the ugly thing between them. He took a deep, raspy breath and said, "Look, my list of regrets is longer than my first book. But I've nearly made a vocation of hating myself. For hurting you most of all. And for compounding it with my ham-handed apology. Misapplication of Step Eight. Or Nine. Whatever. I pretended even to myself I was asking your forgiveness, but what I was actually saying was, Fuck you, Crash, because I was furious with you for sticking me in that place. Among other things. Actually I'm still mad, even though you thought you were saving my life. Maybe I didn't want my life saved. It's my fucking life, right?"

Jeff scooped up a rock and heaved it toward the surf, then lit another cigarette. "And I was angry with you for slowly abandoning me before that, letting friendship slip away while you were taking care of business."

Russell nodded. "I know."

"I was even mad at you for being married to Corrine. I could tell you that what happened with Corrine and me was addictive behavior or something. It's this big relief to say you've been helpless against alcohol and drugs, to have an excuse for all the rotten things you've done." He cupped his hand over the cigarette to protect it from the wind, then took a long, reflective drag.

"Did it ever happen when we were married?"

"Once," Jeff said.

"When?"

"You don't want all the sordid details, do you?"

"Maybe not."

"I've been in love with Corrine since the beginning. I could hardly help that. We've always loved the same things, Crash. I remember at school everyone was always telling me I had to meet you, how you and I were so much alike. Which of course made me hate you. Then later, after you suddenly had Corrine Makepeace living in your room, that almost made me want to hate you all over again."

"I didn't know you were that interested."

"From the beginning it was too late to tell you. God, I was jealous. Especially in New York."

"You?"

"No, my fucking doppelgänger. Who do you think?" Laughing mirthlessly through his nose, he scooped up a handful of sand and let it trickle through his fist onto his sneakers. "I sometimes think of everything I've done since college as an inverse image of your life. Parallel lives. You settled down with Corrine, became the editor. So I did the other thing.
All
the other things."

"You're blaming me?" Russell had meant this lightly, but he could hear the accusation in his voice.

"Sometimes I thought that if I'd married Corrine I would have lived your life and you would have done some of the awful shit I ended up doing." He took a deep breath and clenched his fist around a ball of sand. "I think we both convinced ourselves it was a weird way of being closer to you—I know that sounds like the worst kind of rationalization. So okay, it is. It was. But you were in England and we were both lonely. Or Corrine was lonely and I'd always wanted her."

"Where does Caitlin fit into this?"

"Caitlin knew—I think that's why she finally left. Not that I didn't give her some other reasons. In the end, though, Corrine loved you and she stayed, right? And she did the right thing. I couldn't have been what you were for her. It turns out we're not interchangeable at all."

Jeff coughed violently, scattering sand as he raised his hand to his face. When the attack had subsided he wiped his lips with the back of his arm and shook his head violently. Russell wondered if he was supposed to be drinking.

When he regained his voice, Jeff said, "I felt entitled to take anything I wanted, do anything I wanted. I was a
writer,
right? The rules didn't apply. Anyway, I'd like to go back and do everything differently. But I can't.
We
can't."

Before Jeff had even started this speech Russell discovered he wasn't angry anymore. Unimaginable things happen and we are forced to comprehend them. Before your best friend sleeps with your wife, you would say that it is the unforgivable crime, but only when you're faced with it do you learn what you can live with.

"Are you asking for forgiveness?"

"No, actually I was really hoping you'd keep hating me."

Russell extended his hand and Jeff clasped it. Later he would wish that he had hugged him, for it was his move to make, but it seemed then that there would be time, and at that moment on the beach his sense of holding back was overshadowed by a vast surge of relief, which accompanied the realization of how much trying to hate Jeff had taken out of him.

"What's that shit on your wrist?" Russell said.

"Age spots." Jeff lit another cigarette, cupping his hands over the beleaguered flame of the lighter. "Forgive her, Russell."

"I want to," he said, though he wondered why this seemed more problematic. Sitting there in the cold sand, it made him sad to realize that he understood Jeff far better than he ever would understand Corrine, that the one kind of love was ruled by a different set of laws from those that ruled the other. Because no matter how much you pretended, one kind was exclusive and the other was not. And it made him sad, too, to realize that in spite of this, something was lost between them. "I see us," he said, as if to compensate himself for this insight, "as cranky old men in stained cardigans playing cribbage and silently cursing the pretty nurses."

"No, I see
you
as the old fart on the front porch, in a rocking chair next to Corrine. Despite your little lapse in Frankfurt, you're basically the guy who asks the hooker to paint his house."

"Who does that make you," Russell asked, as Jeff collapsed in a fit of violent coughing. He held one hand over his mouth and propped himself up with the other.

"I'm the guy," he croaked, then cleared his throat, "who can't help believing that getting the hooker to do something else will lead me to an ecstatic merger with the raw stuff of the universe. And who ends up with the clap."

"Aren't you supposed to be healthy now," Russell asked when the coughing jag finally subsided.

"It takes a body a long time to recover from what I did to mine," Jeff said, looking out over the ocean.

"You
are
clean?"

He nodded, poked his cigarette out in the sand.

"You know, I was jealous of you and your nasty, freewheeling life. All the way, right up to the hospital door, part of me wanted to go along for the ride."

"It wasn't that much fun."

The last light was draining into the ocean now.

"At least Washington landed on his feet," Jeff said. "You heard he's back at Corbin, Dern, working for Harold and that corporate pirate of yours?"

"Yeah, he called me. He seems so predictable, and then he always manages to surprise you."

"What really happened with Victor's book," Jeff asked. "Someone told me last week there were thousands of pages of gibberish."

As darkness settled around them, Russell explained how before leaving New York he'd gone to Victor's apartment in the Village, accompanied by a suspicious and proprietorial Corbin, Dern attorney. They spent two days going through Victor's file cabinets, uncovering multiple copies of the pages published in magazines and journals, annotated over and over again in different-colored inks, most of the pages so dense with longhand scrawl as to be entirely illegible. Some of them were nearly black, and fragile as ancient parchment. Apparently Victor had been reworking the same half-dozen chapters for some twenty years. His safety deposit box contained a birth certificate and three thousand in cash. That was it, as Russell had reported back to Corbin, Dern in a stiff, unpleasant meeting with Harold. But Camille Donner, who had previously hinted that the book was a myth, had lately assumed the mantle of grieving widow. In her new version of their life together, she had left his side only temporarily, to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since then, she had hastily rewritten the last chapters of her roman a clef and had opined in an interview that the masterwork, which she had seen with her own eyes, was hidden in a cellar or vault. Conspiracy theorists reported that Corbin, Dern actually had the manuscript and was hyping it with mystery. But the majority concluded that there was nothing there, and that there never had been. Smart New York buzzed with the judgment of fraud, the news humming across the same wires that years before had carried the early rumors of Propp's genius. He became a symbol of false promise and hyped expectations, though Russell chose to consider this a case of noble failure. Failure being something Russell believed he was beginning to understand.

48

Like a man inside a dream who sees himself lying asleep on the bed, Russell felt for a long time that he was waiting to be awakened from the melancholy coma of his days. When, a few weeks after Jeff's visit, the phone rang into the stillness of five in the morning, Sunset Boulevard eerily silent outside the windows of his hotel room, he knew that a summons was at hand.

"Corrine," he said, sitting up in bed, "what's the matter?"

"It's Jeff."

Russell seemed already to know what she was going to tell him, though he'd begun to hope that this particular doom had passed by somehow, dispersed harmlessly into the atmosphere like a storm that breaks up before reaching land.

"What happened?"

"He was in the hospital. Nobody knew. I didn't know until I read in the paper this morning that he'd checked into St. Vincent's. It was pneumonia. I'm at the hospital." Russell waited. On her end Corrine seemed unable to continue, and he was willing to wait indefinitely rather than hear her finish.

"He died fifteen minutes ago."

"You don't die of pneumonia," Russell said, even as he realized that many, many people did die of pneumonia these days, like characters in nineteenth-century novels. Lately it was in all the obituaries.

"I think ... I think he was very sick. He'd been sick for a while."

"Did he tell you?" Neither of them seemed willing to name the disease. "Did the doctors say anything?"

"He knew he was dying," she said. "I should've known. He looked terrible when I saw him—we had dinner... I should have done something."

"There's nothing you could've done."

"I feel like this is
all
my fault," she sobbed.

"I'll get there as soon as I can."

"Come home," she said.

In the will he'd made out a week before he died, Jeff asked to be cremated. He did not want a funeral. After the various hospitalizations the estate was modest, but royalties and what money he had left were to be divided equally between medical and cultural charities. In his loft, which was neat and scrubbed, a manuscript addressed to Russell lay on the desk beside the word processor. For the second time in less than six months Russell found himself the literary executor of a dead friend.