"Is he writing at all? Seems like he's out screwing every model in New York. Maybe he doesn't have another book in him. Some don't."

"Jeff's got plenty of books in him."

Harold had been extremely supportive when Russell-a little embarrassed because the author happened to be one of his best friends-had first showed him the manuscript three years before. He encouraged Russell to buy it, talked it up among his friends in the literary world and, Russell suspected, wired a review or two. Not even Harold could make a book happen, but he could help, and he had. The early succes d'estime was followed by an uncommonly large sale for a collection of short stories, pushing it onto the New York Times best-seller list for a few weeks. Two of the stories had been optioned for the movies, and the translation had just won a literary prize in France. The rising arc of Jeff's star had lifted Russell's, and now Harold's attitude toward the book seemed complicated, as if he'd let the kids use the garage to build a go-cart and they'd emerged with the prototype for a Formula 1 race car. His attitude appeared to waver between wanting his name on the hood as a sponsor and hoping that it would crash and burn in the early laps.

"What's your wife say about the market?"

"Waiting for a correction. Next couple months."

Harold pursed his lips and seemed to weigh this notion.

"What about Rappaport?"

"I'll think about it."

"If you would," Russell said sarcastically.

"Hey, talk to that assistant of yours, will you?" Harold said as Russell was leaving. "Kleinfeld was down here this morning and almost called the cops when he saw her at the Xerox machine. Wearing some T-shirt that said Tuck the Rich.' "

"It was a button that said-"

"Whatever," Harold said. "Tell her to lose it."

"Why?"

"Don't be cute. You're a big boy now, Russell."

Walking back to his office, Russell thought about sending the editor in chief a copy of a widely anthologized essay about the Berkeley free speech movement written by a fiery young polemicist named Harold Stone. Being a big boy presumably meant stifling that kind of impulse.

A junior associate of the old Partisan Review gang, Harold Stone had become known as a Wunderkind even before he came down from Harvard with an essay titled "Bakunin and the Idea of an Avant-Garde." He took a job at Knopf, shared a girl with Bellow and got his glasses broken by Mailer, thereby sealing his reputation. At increasing intervals, he published essays and book reviews that were much discussed in the closing days of the last literary establishment in New York. Along the way he had married a young Waspy debutante who now led an entirely separate existence in New Canaan, Connecticut, though they remained married.

Fresh from the suburban Midwest, Russell had devoured Harold's editions of Sartre and Camus and Gramsci in college; he had read Harold's essays on Lukacs and Kafka. When he arrived in Manhattan after graduate work at Oxford, Russell had been fortunate to find a job at the venerable publishing house where Harold reigned, and to come to the older man's attention by way of some poems he had had published in a quarterly. Perhaps Harold had felt nostalgic for the idea of literary young men coming to the city, grateful for the idea that young men were still writing poetry at all, in the manner of his friends from the Village days so long past; curious to know what the smart young men were reading nowadays; guilty possibly, because as likely as not he was about to have lunch at The Four Seasons with a millionaire author of espionage thrillers. At any rate, Harold had seen something in the poems. He first took Russell out to lunch and later took him under his prickly, owlish wing.

At seven, as he was leaving for the day, Russell stopped by Dave Whitlock's office. Whitlock was staring gloomily at his computer terminal. He was the numbers man: the numbers always seemed to make him unhappy.

"Don't fret, Whit. I've got an anthology of Serbo-Croatian poetry in the works that should turn us around."

"Not today, please," said Whitlock, waving him off.

Russell's age, he had been at Wharton learning econometric models while Russell was at Oxford reading Blake, and had arrived at the firm almost the same day as Russell. Whitlock's great tragedy as a businessman was that he actually read books. Four years before, he could have started with a consulting firm or an investment bank for twice as much money as he was now making in publishing.

"Sorry about the Rappaport book."

"What about it?"

"You didn't hear? Harold cut the print run down to ten thousand this morning."

"I was just in there today. The son of a bitch didn't say a word."

Harold's door was closed and Carlton wasn't at her station. Russell simultaneously rapped and pushed the door open. Harold was sitting on the couch; Carlton was sitting on Harold. In the moment after they registered Russell's presence, both turned to monitor and cover their immediate exposure, banging heads audibly. In raising a hand extracted from Carlton's blouse, Harold spilled her onto the floor. Their faces betrayed them more than the flash of white cotton and flesh: surprise modulating rapidly through guilt to gross indignation.

In the days that followed Russell Calloway was left to imagine what the prevailing emotion would be. But from the first instant, he was fairly certain that opening Harold's door had not been one of the all-time great career moves.

3.

Corrine was getting so tired of parties: dinner parties, birthday parties, publication parties, housewarming parties; holiday and theme parties; opening-night parties, closing-night parties; gallery openings; junior committee benefits for the American Ballet Theater and the Public Library; benefits for the Democratic candidate, the Society for the Facially Disfigured, the Coalition for the Homeless, the American Medical Foundation for AIDS Research; at nightclubs, at the Plaza and the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in honor of someone named Alonzo, this being his entire name, who is a professional fundraiser and party-giver ... a party for Pandy Birdsall, who was moving to L.A. because she'd slept with everybody in New York. "Partying is such sweet sorrow," Jeff said that night.

Last night Russell's colleagues had given a party for a departing editor. So after work Corrine schlepped uptown to Russell's office-subway up to 23rd, twirl around till you figure out you came out of the subway some strange new way and had set off in the wrong direction-then stood around smiling foolishly in a stuffy conference room where impoverished editorial assistants surreptitiously devoured the canapes, gratefully calculating what they were saving on dinner, while the senior staff huddled virtuously in aloof constellations, checking their watches until they could slip off for serious cocktails and fashionable dinners on expense account. Harold Stone with his pained scowl showed up just long enough to convey the impression that fraternizing with his colleagues was slightly less pleasant than catheter insertion, poor Crash still worried that Harold would drop the boom on him; Corrine's comment being, if they wanted privacy why the hell didn't they lock the door? Finally a group of them had gone uptown to Elaine's for an endless, boozy dinner with heaping portions of inside publishing dope...

Now, after a few hours of sleep, Corrine had to go to work. Russell was still in bed. Publishing didn't start until ten; she tried to be in her office by seven forty-five so she could do some research before the staff meeting at eight-fifteen, when the senior brokers would pick issues, analyze the performance of the market the day before, discuss what had happened on the Tokyo exchange. Although today she'd be lucky to make the meeting.

After her shower she still felt exhausted. In the dressing area off the bedroom was a vanity; she sat down with a cup of coffee and turned on the little portable television. God, what a wreck of a face, she thought, looking in the mirror. Methuselah, who turned men to stone. Or was it Medusa? She decided to absolutely stop drinking for a while. Robbing her skin of its youth. Mainline collagen instead.

Applying moisturizer, she listened to an interview with Madonna, who seemed to be claiming that she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe. You wish, honey. Marilyn Monroe probably wished she was Marilyn Monroe. Being gorgeous hadn't done much for her self-esteem. Still, Corrine thought she'd like to try it on for size... 36C or whatever. Russell would be pleased. Hey, there, big boy... two inches and one letter bigger. Come up sometime and see me-no, that was Mae West. Inspire him to come to bed a little earlier, with romantic inclinations. Not just pass out. Be nice if, like men, they would get big for sex-so the boys could play with and admire them-and then shrink back down again so they wouldn't get in the way. Why not? Another example of men getting the better deal. Nature was misogynist. She smoothed foundation over the pale skin, lingering on a thin blue vein under her cheek. The night after her birthday party was the last time, almost two weeks before. Could it be that long? Other men seemed to find her attractive enough. On the street, on the subway, at parties. Always at parties.

A tiny mole on her chin that her mother called a beauty mark and her father wanted to have removed. Dab, dab. Cover it up, cover girl. Hopeless. Paper-bag-over-head time. A simple grocery bag for work and around the house, a Saks or Bergdorf bag for evening wear.

Color fix around the eyes. Looking at the raccoon circles underneath. She wondered if all those names starting with M on TV just now had made her think of Medusa. MTV. Was that publicly held? Must check. Marilyn and Madonna and Medusa. With regard to the market she secretly believed in omens. Not by themselves, but if everything else looked right. You started with the numbers, but in the end sometimes you needed one more piece. But what was the significance of this M motif? Buy Monsanto? Sell Mobil? She needed more input. More M-put. Sometimes she relied on her dreams, but she was so tired she couldn't remember her dreams this morning.

Sibyl. That was what she needed. A dream reader. Did anybody still read entrails? Messy. Like this hair. Was Medusa the one with snakes for hair? Corrine's looked distinctly snakelike this morning. Nest of vipers. Forked-tongue split ends. Sibilant. What she needed was the new, improved shampoo with miracle conditioner that untangles your hair, erases your wrinkles, firms and lifts your breasts and makes your husband want to shave before he comes to bed and fuck you till the cows come home. Lather, rinse, repeat. Daily. Every morning she vowed she would cut all her hair off, it was a pain, and besides, wasn't it girlish to have hair past your shoulders? But Russell would never forgive her. Men have this thing about hair and women. Want lots on your head, hardly any elsewhere.

Still looking like hell, she went out to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Russell's camel-hair coat tossed over the back of the couch. Once upon a time she would have found this cute. This morning it just pissed her off.

Back in the bedroom she went to work on her eyes. Windows of the soul. Well, windows needed frames and drapes, didn't they? Brushing on eye shadow. Shutters by Chanel. A nice copper shade on the crow's-feet. The bird with the coppery, keen claws. Who was that... Wallace Stevens? A thing about birds, that guy. Looked like Hitchcock, too. Parrots, parakeets, flocks of pigeons. Complacencies of the peignoir-she could use a little of that this morning. Her robe was beat-a total rag.

We're here this morning with Johnny Moniker, the latest star on the fashionable downtown scene...

Corrine looked up at the TV set. Guy looked familiar, kind of cute. She hadn't quite caught the name-Johnny Monologue? She was almost sure he'd been at the apartment a few weeks before. Dark, nasty good looks... She'd seen him with Jeff, maybe.

Corrine scuttled over to the bed and prodded Russell.

"There's this guy on TV we've seen somewhere," she said. "Who?"

"That's what I want to know." She bounced childishly on the bed. "Johnny something."

"Johnny got his gun, shot his wife. Because she woke him up."

"No. Come look."

"Somebody we know?" he said, still refusing to budge.

"Not really. We just met him for a minute."

"Johnny we hardly knew ye."

By the time she got him to the TV they were showing spring fashions from Milan.

"Why am I awake," Russell asked.

Sighing, Corrine went to the bathroom for the aspirin. Only Corrine, Russell thought, would be surprised to see someone vaguely familiar on TV. That was the whole point of TV, to make everything familiar. It was like her dreams. Almost every morning she would wake him with the words, "I had the strangest dream, " as if she expected dreams somehow to be less dreamlike. She was relentlessly logical, like a child. Her superstition, which seemed when he had first met her to be at odds with the general cast of her character, was actually a corollary of this logical bent. She didn't believe in random events, so if the number eleven swam into her ken several times in the course of a morning she felt certain that there must be a good reason, some deep structure of which this was a coordinate, even if she couldn't figure out exactly what it was. As it turned out, the combination of mathematical genius, tenacity and a superstitious nature made her an excellent reader of the stock market.

He climbed back into bed.

"How do I look," Corrine asked after she handed him the aspirin. He shook three out of the bottle and looked up.

"Fabulously gorgeous."

"I do not."

"Yes you do. Got something going at the office? Something on the side?"

"I should. Can't seem to get a rise out of you lately."

"Hey, I'm sorry. Literally working my balls off. Plus all this goddamn socializing. We'll stay home tonight."

"Promise?" She knelt beside the bed and stroked his forehead. "Let's order in and have a fire."

"Shit." He frowned. "I've got dinner with an agent."

"Cancel it." She buried her head in his neck and began to tickle his earlobe with the tip of her tongue.

"I'd do it in a minute, honey, but he's going back to L.A. tomorrow."

"What's all this L.A. stuff?"

"I'm being sucked into the entertainment business, like the rest of the country."

She stood up abruptly and straightened her blouse.

"He's got a client I want to sign for a book. Tomorrow night we'll stay home." Russell sat all the way up in bed to demonstrate good faith. "Promise."

"The check's in the mail," Corrine said. "And I won't come in your mouth." That would put a little blush on his face. She blew him a kiss, turned and walked out with a haughty, rhythmic deployment of her buttocks.

"Great ass," Russell called after her.

"None for you," she responded.

Across the hall, Mrs. Oliver opened her door as far as the chain would stretch and peered out, her pruney face framed between door and jamb, the brass chain pressed above her lip like a mustache, her Yorkie yipping behind her. Since her husband had passed on to that old men's club in the sky, Mrs. Oliver spent her waking hours standing behind the door, waiting for the sound of a footstep on the stairs, as if it were her fondest wish to be a prosecution witness before she departed this crime-ridden world. All day long she opened and closed the door like a bivalve drawing nutrients from the ocean. Corrine waved.

Downstairs, Roger held the door for her and smiled. "Good morning, Mrs. Calloway." Watching her pass, the doorman felt a flutter of desire that was like a shot of helium in his lungs, lifting him up, making him weightless with the exhilaration of her presence, which for one moment he shared with no one else, and when she had passed he felt sad and lumpish with desire.

Out in the air, she started to feel better. Crisp, excoriating January cold. The sky was bright and clear, having, unlike Corrine, gone to sleep at a sensible hour. Joggers passing in bright colors, damn them. Someday she intended to start exercising again. Three Pekingese inspected a fragrant crack in the sidewalk in front of a brownstone while their mistress stood patiently tethered on three leashes, blue-haired, wearing an empty plastic baggie on her free hand.

At Lexington, Corrine smelled pot; two men in suits walking ahead of her were sharing a joint. The phrase "Cola Wars" drifted back to her with the smoke: ad guys, jump-starting inspiration.

After buying the Journal outside the subway entrance, she plunged underground into the briefcase-toting army of the employed and stood jam-packed with a thousand other New Yorkers on the platform, thinking that although they looked featureless together, their inner lives seethed beneath the worsted wool-scores of them cheating on their spouses and their taxes, dreaming of murder and flight. If she were to ask she would find herself connected through friends and acquaintances with many of them; if a catastrophe were to strike they would all find themselves linked and bonded, but now they stood silent and remote. The phrase find the cure stenciled on the post beside her. How many people on the platform had it? What was that old poem Russell had written about at Oxford? "Journal in Time of Plague"? Something about light falling from the air...

She lifted her paper and disappeared into the columns of newsprint, to emerge ninety blocks downtown, borne up to the surface by the heavily bundled throngs, pumped out onto Wall Street, which marked the northern frontier of New Amsterdam and was named for the seventeenth-century log wall that had protected the Dutch settlers from the Indians and the British. Shunning the contemporary female custom of wearing running shoes between home and office, Corrine clicked along on calf pumps just outside the limits of the invisible ancient wall, high-stepping over buried ceramic pipe bowls and wine jugs, bent nails, broken glass and brick fragments, partially fossilized pig, chicken and sheep bones, and other detritus that had been regularly tossed over the wall three centuries before, her route so familiar that she was as oblivious to it as she was to what was underneath the pavement, not really seeing the towering temples to Mammon as she walked toward the one in which she toiled, reading her paper in the available light that found its way to the canyon floor.

"So, people, this could be the day. The big day, the historic day. The market's looking good, it's looking fit and ready. I think we're going to hit two thousand. The big two-oh-oh-oh. And I think we want to use this as our selling point, particularly in our cold-calling situation."

"Go, team," Corrine whispered to Duane.

"We want to say, 'Mr. John Q. Doctor, you've been missing out here, history's being made today, and your neighbors are getting rich. How about you?' "

Sitting beside her in the overheated conference room, Duane Peters involuntarily nodded in agreement, his yellow tie bobbing up and down on his chest like something meant to attract fish. These yellow ties were too much in the morning-Duane and the supervisor both. So was the pep talk.

It was all too much. The Dow Jones would probably hit two grand today, but Corrine thought it was crazy. The economy was in dreary shape, inventories high, GNP slow, but the Dow kept shooting up. It was a kind of mass hypnosis. Castles in the air.

She had to be careful what she said around the office. Wall Street was pumped up. It was like a cocaine jag. Everyone grinning fiendishly, talking too fast, not quite focusing on anything. The clients, too. Especially the clients. Corrine tried to moderate their greed, urging them to look for real value. Though she wasn't above listening to her superstitions, her basic resource was simple math. If an established company was selling at ten times earnings, it was probably a better bet than an upstart going for fifty times earnings. But everybody wanted instant gratification. They wanted to be junior arbitrageurs. They wanted risk without downside. Big beta factors and guaranteed return. They wanted to get in on a takeover prospect right before it went into play and double their money in three days. They wanted whatever was in the headlines that week, preferably on margin. They wanted to be able to tell their dinner guests they sold short on a turkey. They wanted sex and drugs and rock-and-roll.

Russell was the worst. When he and Corrine finally agreed to divide their tiny investment capital in half, he started trading frequently with Duane. Lately Russell had mentioned he wanted to get into options. She told him she didn't want to hear about it. Her portion, less than two thousand-very big deal-stayed in the money market.

The supervisor was messianic on the subject of phone technique. This part Corrine tuned out. After the meeting, Duane walked her back to their adjoining work stations. He was blond, athletically proportioned, a man of his times, and his predominant mood was up. He, too, was a little too much in the morning.

"Any hot ones today, beautiful," he asked.

Corrine shook her head. They walked down a long aisle flanked with work stations, computer terminals with video screens glowing green with numbers. They had been through the training program together and now shared a secretary. Corrine liked their bantering camaraderie, although she was afraid she might have to throw a little cold water on him soon. The problem with Duane, it seemed to her, was that someone had once told him that he was dashingly handsome, and he'd taken it to heart. There was a kind of self-consciousness to his insouciant gestures and his attention to dress that made him seem comic. Maybe it was just youth. He was almost five years younger, having arrived here straight out of Dartmouth--all the kids now rushing headlong into professions they'd chosen in the cradle. Whatever happened to trying things out? Corrine had tried Europe, law school and Sotheby's and felt like the last of a species-almost the oldest broker at her firm. No country for old men, this business.

Duane was talking about a hot tip, biotech.

"Have you checked it out," she asked, just to say something.

"Looking real good, numberwise." As an analyst he was a little flighty, though he was doing well in the current flighty market.

She stopped in front of her own station, demarked by flimsy partitions on three sides, a token of her seniority. "Cold-calling," Duane asked.

"Eventually." She sighed. It was what she hated most about the business, ambushing strangers on the phone, trying to sell them something they didn't know they wanted. At first that was all she did, but now she at least had a roster of regular customers, though not yet enough that she could afford to stop soliciting.

"Look what I have," Duane said, extracting a stapled sheaf of papers from a folder. He held it between his fingers, dangling it like a treat, and made the cooing sound of a pigeon.

"What is it?"

"Only an up-to-the-minute mailing list of every dentist in New York State."

"Where did you get that?" Doctors and dentists, wealthy and financially unsophisticated, were the preferred diet of the small broker. He brushed the edge of the partition with his fingers and checked them for dust before leaning against it.