My Bright Midnight

Walter and Nadine and Sammy meet and become fast friends because they are fat friends. Walter is an emigre from Germany. It's New Orleans in the 1930 and 1940s. They go to the movie palaces, and watch Abbott and Costello, Tarzan, Lauren Bacall. Those of us who grew in the same era will be bewitched by these references direct from our childhoods: FDR and sword-rattling in Europe and "fighting the krauts" and baseball games on the radio --- not live but made up by an announcer reading play-by-play teletype reports, complete with fake cheers and boos and crowd sounds.
But here, it is the movies that do it. We meet Sylvia who can recite whole lines from The More the Merrier, The Maltese Falcon, Sullivan's Travels. And this killer from Mae West:
"Is that a banana in our pocket, or are you happy to see me?"
"Goodness."
"Goodness has nothing to do with it!"
Walter, the narrator, writes, "We three hid in the dark watching newsreels and cartoons, musical and love stories." Later, Sammy and Nadine were supping at Katz's, "two fatties eating hot fudge sundaes . . . a joke for the gum-popping schoolgirls and soda jerk to share." They wave Walter over to join them.
It ain't much of a storyline but it blooms in Russell's hands, a funny mix of William Saroyan and Sherwood Anderson. Walter and Nadine and Sammy go on a crash diet together, turn slim and beautiful, and Nadine and Walter get hitched. Sammy buys them a honeymoon at the Monteleone, "a place good enough for a wedding night." Nadine hugged him and said, "What's the good word?"
"How can you afford all this?" I asked.
He shrugged. "My horse won."
§ § §
We all find out too late that Sammy's a sneak and a liar. And a marriage-buster.
Fast forward a few weeks. Walter comes home early from his work at the bakery:
The bedroom door was open, and she and Sammy were tangled together. My heart tore when I saw them but I didn't make a sound . . . .I didn't mean to tiptoe through the front rooms, but while my heart was ripping, I couldn't ignore how beautiful Nadine and Sammy had become, and I wondered if I too was that lovely when she held me. This is why I didn't yell, why it didn't occur to me to hunt for a hatchet or a pistol to kill my best friend and my wife.
And when he finally reveals himself, Sammy gets up and says, "What's the good word, Walter?"
§ § §
This one is an oldie --- came out five years ago, one of those sleepers that you leave on the shelf until one day, when they haven't mailed the books they had promised to send, and, despite the gaudy cover and the uninspiring type, you find yourself caught up in an odd, bitter-sweet triangle with a scoundrel, a willing adulteress . . . and what we have to assume is a hopeless romantic. It catches you up and won't let you go until you finally get to the end where thank god the author firmly and finally disposes of Sammy (gambling stick-up gone wrong) and leaves kind Walter and lovely Nadine to work out the rest of their feckless lives together.
The shoot-em-up is not the fulcrum of the whole book, however. More probably it's that beautiful couple caught in the sunset bed, and the kick in My Bright Midnight is the writing, at times discordant, at times dishevelled, but always to the point. Finding a wife in bed with another man is effortlessly, soulfully flipped upside-down when Walter says that he couldn't ignore how beautiful Nadine and Sammy had become, and I wondered if I too was that lovely when she held me.
Later in rapprochement, in bed, in love again, Walter and Nadine, "Each of us breathed in the spent air the other gasped out, and I grew lighthearted as her panting rose from alto to soprano. I forgave her everything --- cuckholding, calling me Kraut, buying kindness from [her previous inlaws] the Zancas."
And then, this poignant passage, one that encompasses so much --- youth, sleeplessness, patterns on the ceiling, books, fooling your folks --- all hitched together in one gentle passage, he, Walter, next to Nadine afterward,
unable to join her in the sleep into which she quickly and deeply tumbled. I watched the ceiling and remembered how my thoughts had kept me awake when I was a child, how after hours of studying the crack across my boyhood ceiling --- river on a snow map, black lightning bolt across a white sky --- I began hearing the words inside the schoolbooks stacked up on my desk, and I rose, opened their covers and listened, checking the window for dawn after each page so I could put out the lamp and hurry into bed and trick my mother into thinking I'd been asleep.