Read Online Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney - Free Book Online

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.
    "Sorry. Can't divulge my sources. However, if you would join me for lunch today, I could maybe shave off a few of these names with home and office numbers for you. The Q's and the X's, say?"
    "Give me the M's."
    "Come to lunch."
    "Deal."
    He handed her several sheets and disappeared, then called from the other side of the partition, "Where, by the way, is the lissome Laura?" His head reappeared. "Isn't she supposed to be our full-time secretary? Or am I mixed up on this?"
    "She'll be in by ten," Corrine said.
    "Wish J could keep banker's hours." He withdrew again.
    Corrine didn't want to tell him that Laura was on a go-see. Although she wore a size fourteen and had a troublesome complexion, Laura dreamed of Paris runways and magazine covers and had been attending a modeling academy at night. The brochure claimed to guarantee success in the world's most glamorous career; by the time Laura showed it to Corrine it was too late for her to say anything. Corrine did not expect to lose Laura to the Ford agency, and she covered for her so Laura would have a job to come back to when her dream faded away. Duane, on the other hand, would have been a bit cruel about the whole thing.
    Corrine looked at the Journal, punched up numbers on some stocks she'd been watching. At about nine-thirty, she began calling.
    When Laura returned, she seemed dispirited and said nothing about the go-see. Delivering the mail later, she said to Corrine, "Did you see Johnny Moniker on TV this morning?"
    "Yeah, but who is he?" Corrine demanded.
    "I don't know. I see him in the magazines."
    And then a morning of painful dental work.
    When the market closed at 2,003, a cheer went up around the trading room. Duane waltzed around the partition and swept Corrine into his arms, taking advantage of the situation to slip her a little tongue.
    Corrine was on the phone with a client and twisted her head away. The client was upset because Corrine had him in a stock that had grown only nineteen percent for the first six months of the year, and he had just read in Forbes that the market was up twenty-two percent for the same period. She suggested that if he averaged in the dividend he would find himself way ahead of the game. Duane stood off to one side, absently adjusting the gold stickpin that held the two sides of his collar together. She rolled her eyes for him, held up one finger. Corrine didn't think anybody under forty should wear stickpins.
    "Get me out of here," she moaned when she finally hung up.
    They walked over to Harry's, a basement saloon favored by the boozier traders and brokers and by the news media whenever the market was news, as it was today. A crowd had formed around the entrance; pitchers of beer were being handed around on the sidewalk. Like a flock of fearless panhandlers wielding outstretched paper cups, representatives of the electronic press thrust microphones at every passing face.
    "Everybody here seems pretty happy," said a glamorous blonde who aimed her microphone at Corrine.
    "Let's hope they're not hung over tomorrow or the next day," Corrine said.
    "What do you mean by that? Do you think the market's peaked?"
    "I hope not," she said judiciously, as Duane yanked her forward.
    Eventually Duane managed to get a bottle of champagne, with which he sprayed himself and some of their neighbors.
    "You're that excited about the market?"
    "This is actually to celebrate our anniversary," he said.
    "What anniversary," she asked suspiciously.
    "Two years since we entered the training program."
    "You're sweet."
    "So are you," he said earnestly, his big blond eyebrows nearly meeting in the middle. She could see an attack of sincerity coming on him like a sneeze. "In fact, you're the sweetest girl I've ever met."
    She laughed and tapped his glass, and