Russell spent the rest of the morning on the telephone wooing skittish agents.
"Of course the financing's in place," was his refrain. "Don't worry about it, the money's there." Between calls he stared from his window down Broadway, where the marquee of the Circus Cinema advertised pick of the chicks and boobacious.
Next door, Washington took a call from Bernie Melman.
"Please hold for Mr. Melman," said the secretary.
And that, Washington said to himself, was his second mistake.
"Washington, Bernie Melman here. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about that misunderstanding the other day. "
"A week ago, actually."
"Russell tells me you're doing okay."
"The stitches are out, if that's what you mean."
"I'd hate to have this sour our relationship. So if there's anything I can—
"It might behoove you to dismiss that racist who beat me up."
"Listen, you don't know how hard it is to fire somebody these days. You need a dispensation from the ACLU, practically. I got you on one side and this guy who's been with me four years on the other. But I think we can arrange something amicable here, right?"
"Anything's possible. You tell me."
"Let's get together next week and talk about it. "
"I'd hate to see a guy like Parker get hold of this thing. You never can tell—he might really run with it. "
"I know you wouldn't let that happen," Melman said, the amiability draining from his voice.
"Shit happens, Bernie."
"Not to me, it doesn't."
At the end of the day—after a stressful meeting with Jerry Kleinfeld at the Corbin, Dern offices to discuss details of the transition—Russell met Trina Cox for a drink at a Japanese restaurant. In greeting she slipped him several inches of tongue, which somehow put him in mind of the red, white and pink slabs of fish behind the glass of the sushi bar. Trina herself seemed particularly corporeal, red-cheeked and fleshy—as if she'd just ridden in on horseback, English saddle of course—her hair barely tamed with one of those black velvet hairbands that only girls who went to prep school knew how to wear. Russell's resistance to her dental probe was somewhat lax. "I'm in the mood for something raw," she said, sliding her eyes across the glass case before returning them to Russell.
"The torn is good," Russell suggested, disingenuously.
"When I did a deal in Tokyo I had this great dish called odori ebi— dancing shrimp. They have these prawns swimming in a fish tank behind the sushi bar and they dip them out and peel the shells off right in front of you, the shrimp are twitching like mad, and then they pop a little wasabi on their tails to keep them twitching. You eat them," she said, "while they're still alive."
"What's got you so cranked," Russell asked, feeling invigorated himself, unconsciously leaning forward when she did, dropping his gaze into the shadows below the lacy edge of her silk top.
"I've got a possible new deal going, a hostile. Makes me feel kind of carnivorous."
Russell described his own day. To be able to admit the almost physical pleasure he was taking in his work, in his new position in the world, was a great relief. At home, with Corrine, he felt he had to hide his enthusiasm, pretend he had not become one of those people whose actions have consequences in the world beyond their apartment walls, pretend to be interested in new curtains.
"Let's celebrate, Russell. We deserve a little something."
"I can't, not tonight," he said, absently admiring the slope of her bust.
She flagged the counterman and ordered sake. "When are you going to Frankfurt?"
"I don't know. Early October?"
"I might be in Brussels. Maybe I'll hop over and say hi."
"That would be nice," he said, looking away as if to disavow any excessive personal interest in the travel plans of this particular business associate.
34
Corrine dreams that she is flying, clinging to a powerful winged back, but she can't see the human face. She is a child. Beneath her the East River sparkles kaleidoscopically; septic microorganisms waiting like piranhas to devour anything that falls into their ken. Now she is buffeted by violent thermals, losing altitude, falling...
"Your alarm went off half an hour ago." Russell shaking her awake. "I need a forklift to get you up these days."
It was true. She never wanted to wake up anymore. Let me sleep all day.
Russell playing his shaving tune in the bathroom—a long whistle of hot water, then the clunk of the valve in the tap, followed by another screech—his head full of business and power. He woke early these days.
"Are you up?" he sang above the whine of the hot-water pipe.
When he finally emerged in the paisley robe she had bought him for his birthday the year before, she said, "I was flying in my dream."
"Sex," he said, bending close enough for her to smell the almond scent of his shaving soap.
"No, that wasn't—"
"Something about airline stocks. Takeover rumors at Pan Am."
"I was flying over the East River."
"Buy Eastern Airlines."
"But I was about to fall."
Russell stood in front of the closet studying the row of shirts. "Buy insurance."
"When did you get that tie?" Yellow with a tiny print. "I don't know. A while ago."
"You look like all the guys at my office."
"You really know how to draw blood, don't you?" He was smiling.
"It was a man with wings but I couldn't see his face," she said, once again demonstrating, it seemed to Russell, her random-access memory.
"Now we're back to sex." He walked toward the bed holding a blue shirt with floppy French cuffs and a yellow tie. "Who was this winged man? You catch his name?"
"Icarus, maybe."
He held two barbell cufflinks in his palm; she took them and pinioned one cuff, then the other, decided not to ask when he'd adopted French cuffs.
"You sure it wasn't Duane Peters?" he said.
"Duane? Duane from the office? Why would you think that?"
"That story Jeff wrote. The character based on you seems to have an affair with a character not unlike your pal Duane."
"He's your broker," Corrine reminded him. "And it was a story, as you like to say."
"A lot of it was pretty real."
"Not that," she said nervously.
But Russell seemed merely perfunctory in his suspicions, checking himself now in the mirror. "Kiss, kiss. Gotta go."
The falling dream was still with her at the office; the market had been bumpy, gliding and dipping on wings of wax. Outside, the leaves were beginning to turn and fall as interest rates rose ominously. Yet the new Business Week was bullish as ever. "The economy is strengthening, inflation is modest, corporate profits are exploding, the three-year binge of corporate takeovers is still in full force, and the U.S. stock market remains the cheapest in the world." So no problem, apparently. After five losing days the Dow was soaring again. Corrine was making money for her clients, but she felt a sense of vertigo. Sick, actually. Between phone calls she tried to remember when her period was due. Duane Peters raced past, his yellow tie flipped insouciantly over his shoulder, patting hers and humming "We're in the Money."
When she'd come in the week before, Duane had congratulated her on Russell's victory. "How are you going to celebrate?"
"I'm buying the very best in sackcloth and ashes."
"In what?"
"In token of my new widowhood."
"I'm getting a boat," Duane said.
"You?"
Duane winked and put a finger to his lips.
"Did Russell tell you?" He shook his head. She mouthed the words You could go to jail.
"All very discreet," he said, as she spun and walked away.
Since then he'd avoided her, but in the elevator at the end of the
day, he invited her for a drink at Harry's. The Dow had closed up seventy-five on 210 million shares. Once they were on the sidewalk she stopped. "Did Russell tell you he was making a run on the company?"
"Don't worry, he didn't tell me anything. "
"I think I ought to know if my husband's a felon."
"Let's not be real obvious about this, shall we?" They were caught up in a surge of ambulatory bodies, the evening drainage of humanity from the great ziggurats of the Financial District.
After several blocks they detached themselves from the flow and Duane clapped his hand on her shoulder. "Two months ago Russell placed an order for a hundred thousand dollars' worth of stock. He didn't tell me anything. I just thought he must have known what he was doing, particularly since he worked for the damn company and I knew he didn't have any money of his own. I copied the trade, but not in my own account. A friend bought some shares. Okay?" They were standing in a peaceful alley lined with three-story brick houses that had once been the tiny Jewish ghetto of New Amsterdam.
"It's not okay. I should report you."
"Corrine, let's not get radical about this."
"But Russell didn't buy any stock himself, right? Melman did all the buying. We don't have any money. We certainly don't have a hundred grand."
"Just between you and me, he borrowed fifty thousand on some credit card and I leveraged it up to a hundred on margin."
"You're both out of your minds."
"We're both players, babe. Forget about it. We never had this conversation. New topic. Like, who was it was telling me you had lunch once with J. D. Salinger? So what did he talk about?"
"It was years ago, I don't even remember."
"He must've talked about something, for Chrissake."
"He talked about vitamins."
An hour later Corrine was serving chili to the men at the mission, and the contrast served only to increase her loathing for the world of arbitrage and copied trades and bullish yellow ties. Although autumn seemed to quicken the pulse of most city dwellers, the homeless became glum and apprehensive as the nights grew colder.
Two hours later, at a bistro in SoHo, she looked at Russell over a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
"On our credit card, Russell?"
"The stock's up forty percent. That's forty thou'. Don't worry about it."
"What if you'd lost the bid?"
"I didn't." He winked. "Which is what we are celebrating here. I wish you'd eat something, maybe even break down and have a glass of champers..."
"The deal isn't closed yet. It's still contingent on the financing, Russell. What if that falls through?"
"It won't."
"Promise me you'll sell all the stock and pay off the credit line."
"I will."
"What you did was just crazy, but what Duane did was illegal."
"He's your friend, not mine," Russell said pointedly. Not really threatened, he was only too happy to deflect attention from his own shortcomings.
"Don't be ridiculous," she said. "So he's got a crush."
They were out alone for what seemed to her the first time in months. Russell was irrepressible, full of himself and his plans for the company. She just wished she felt a little better so she could appreciate his mood.
When they got home he became very gentle and amorous, coming up behind her in the bathroom and rubbing her back as she brushed her teeth and watched his face in the mirror while trying to suppress the squirrelly weirdness in her abdomen, because she wanted to make love to her husband, to do the mystery dance. Was it just them, or were men and women on such different schedules? Had Russell's ardor slackened as hers grew inexorably more acute? She pictured a nocturnal future in which she was propped sleepless on fluffed pillows cradling a dull hardcover under a book light, while Russell's back rose like a cliff from the middle of the bed.
Her orgasm obliterated the nausea, but only for a while. Check tomorrow and see when you're due, she thought, remembering how— when was it, three weeks, a month ago?—Russell had come home from a business dinner in one of these passionate moods that she had learned to seize upon, how he'd steered her down the hall into the bedroom, unzipping the back of her dress as he went, and how she had thought about her diaphragm sitting in its little plastic clamshell on the shelf of the medicine cabinet, and then decided that her need for him was greater than her caution and wouldn't wait, that his need might not survive the interruption, and would it be so bad, after all?
It was noontime the following day before she remembered to look at her checkbook, where she kept a fairly accurate record of her cycles, marking off the days of her period on the calendar in the back. July 31 through August 5 were crossed off. It didn't take much math; as something like giddiness swelled up within her she saw that the pattern of marks on the rows of weeks showed her late by about two rows. The pattern hardly varied through 1986 and most of 1987.
In the ladies' room, Corrine examined her face carefully in the mirror. She reached up to cup her sore breasts in her palms. Bigger, definitely bigger. Russell would like that part, wouldn't he? As she studied herself in the mirror her eyes swelled with tears. She wasn't sure why. For the past few days, she realized, she had not felt at all in command of her own emotions; it seemed as if some powerful new force was struggling to assert itself, demanding her attention, letting her know that for the rest of her life her tears and her smiles would be subject to a new authority.
After a long meeting in which he and Whitlock had studied P&Ls on all outstanding contracts, Russell was informed by Donna that Corrine had called again. "New button," Russell asked, pointing to her left breast, which invariably displayed an inspirational message; it was her signature, just as Russell's was a silk pocket square. The new one read: "I Kill When I Come—Robert E. Chambers": a reference to the current case of a teenager who claimed he'd inadvertently strangled his date during an alleged sexual encounter in Central Park. "Very tasteful, Donna," Russell remarked.
"We can't all be yuppies," she said.
After retreating into his office, he called Corrine's office.
"What's up?"
"Nothing. I just wanted to say hi. Are you all right?"
"I'm fine, kind of going out of my mind here. These books don't show much profit, most of them. Are you sure you're all right?"
"I'm fine. I guess I just wanted to hear your voice."
Corrine left work right after the market closed, and stopped at a pharmacy. Half an hour later, having peed into a paper cup and emptied it into a test tube, she awaited the results of her home pregnancy test. What if it came out positive? Was she going to tell him? Maybe not right away. He'd just delivered a lecture about how they couldn't afford to have her quit her job.
Too nervous to read or think, she turned on Live at Five and paced the floor of the living room, checking the bathroom every few minutes. What does it mean, she wondered, that old thing about the rabbit dying? She scrutinized the test tube. If a sort of clot precipitated out from the solution, then chances were good they'd need a second bedroom in about eight months.
Arriving home after drinks with a neurotic but important agent, Russell found Corrine in one of her buoyant moods. She asked him brightly how his day had been, and he replied that it started off with the news that the old Corbin, Dern management was suing him on seventeen counts. "And Washington's threatening to sue Bernie Melman. Then Bernie told me absolutely no way will we pay a fucking penny more, as he nicely put it, for Propp's book until he delivers the merchandise. One of the all-time great days, a real salad, not to say halcyon, day. Remind me, how and why did I get into this mess?"
"Let's go out to dinner," Corrine suggested, moving around the apartment like a trapped fly, landing for a moment to straighten a picture or move an ashtray before taking off for another part of the room.
"I'm beat. Let's order in."
"We could eat at home by candlelight. We haven't
done that in ages, Russ. And then maybe take a bath."
"Whatever," Russell said, but when he saw the look on her face he got up from the chair he'd collapsed into and took her in his arms, pressing her cheek against his collarbone, where it had been so many times before.
"It's just work," he said.
"Oh, Russell," she whispered, "I'm pregnant."
"I was so afraid you'd be angry," she said later.
"Why would I be angry?"
"Well, unhappy, anyway." They were lying on top of the bed, their clothes scattered on the floor and the bedspread.
"God, I've been such a jerk lately, haven't I?"
"Maybe just a tiny bit of a jerk."
"I've been a pig."
"But now you're cured." She giggled. "A cured pig. A ham, I guess that makes you."
"You're going to be an extremely silly mother."
For several minutes they lay there in silence. Russell waited for the first glimmer of doubt to qualify his happiness; he imagined it would come, and if so it should come and go immediately in order that he could continue to feel this way, as if he were the first man in history to have conceived a baby with his wife. A muscled patriarch, holding a club in the light of a huge fire, standing guard over the woman and child within the cave. At first he'd been shocked. But the next thing was a huge wave of excitement, which brought in its wake an overwhelming desire to make love to Corrine, to bring himself into contact with this mystery.
"What are you thinking," Corrine asked, propping herself up on one elbow and looking down into Russell's eyes. "Are you okay? Tell me."
"There's something worrying me, a big question," Russell said, looking grim, almost hating himself when he saw the panic in her eyes. "Andover or Exeter?"
At four a.m., Russell woke in a cold sweat. He got up and walked into the living room, his hands trembling, wishing he had a cigarette, though he had quit them more than two years back. He had never been so scared in his life as now.
Who the hell was he to be a father? Still practically a kid himself, thirty-one years old, about nineteen and a half emotionally. Up till the night before it seemed that a trip up the Amazon or in the Himalayas, a life in Paris or Kyoto, a stint in the Peace Corps or as a ski bum— these things were still hypothetically possible; he and Corrine had talked recently about a year in Florence. And what about that little episode with Trina, he hadn't actually done anything... anything much, a little tongue, a little tit... but still, goddamnit, what kind of father was he going to make if he was so easily tempted to fuck around? Screw around. With a kid he had to stop saying "fuck" all the time, too, and that was highly fucking likely. And money. What if the deal failed? He wondered if his own father had entertained any of these fears, imagined his own generation was spawned with less forethought. Coming of age in the wake of an alleged sexual revolution, in the brief heyday of the pill and legalized abortion, his was perhaps the first generation to view reproduction as a strictly voluntary bodily function. Was he ready to volunteer? Uncle Stork wants you.