The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  “The headmaster would like to see you immediately, Mr. Savage.” Will stared at Matson, unmoving, until the housemaster began to turn pink. “If you’d like I can summon security,” he said.

  Will turned to me with a comradely look and said, “Can you believe what a dickhead this guy is?”

  “It was not without difficulty that I convinced the headmaster you had nothing to do with your roommate’s activities,” Matson said to me after Will had turned and marched out. “But if you know anything about this matter I’d advise you to cooperate.”

  “Will hasn’t done anything wrong,” I insisted, then turned and ran up the stairs. My own possessions were relatively unscathed, but Will’s were strewn across the room. I began to put things away as I waited for him to return. Twenty minutes later he came in and sat on the bed. He seemed unnaturally calm.

  “Did you tell him where the money came from?” I demanded.

  “I told him I wasn’t a drug dealer. That was all he needed to know.”

  “You’ve got to tell them something.”

  “I don’t see why. It’s my money.”

  “They’ll kick you out for sure.”

  “Do you think numbers running would be viewed more favorably than drug dealing?”

  “Maybe, if it’s off campus.”

  “And if it doesn’t involve any white people.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “It’s almost always the point.”

  “Get real, Will.”

  I was furious at Matson, of course, but no less furious at Will for his refusal to defend himself. The discipline committee was scheduled to meet in two days. Will snored soundly that night, but I was unable to sleep. In the light of morning, only one plan of rescue seemed feasible. I skipped breakfast to call Will’s father; if I got to him before the headmaster did I thought he might be able to devise an explanation for his son’s cash. I didn’t tell Will, since I was pretty certain he would be violently opposed to the plan.

  “Well, where did he get the damn money,” Cordell asked, after I assured him that Will was no drug dealer. “I know he’s not the type to save up his allowance.”

  “I’d rather not say, sir.”

  “Patrick, if you want to save Will’s ass you better tell me everything.”

  And so I explained the numbers operation, though I pretended not to know the identity of Will’s partner. I was relieved that Cordell sounded more incredulous than angry—if anything he seemed proud of his son’s enterprise. He made me promise not to tell Will, or anyone, that we had spoken.

  Cordell flew up for the hearing that night. I was downstairs in the common room, pacing, when father and son walked in. Will was as sullen as his father was cheerful. “Well, Patrick,” said Mr. Savage, “we seem to have convinced them to keep Will on until he decides to do something truly heinous. I thought you might like to join us for a little off-campus celebration at the Inn? They used to serve a nice prime rib in my time.”

  I studied Will to see if his father had betrayed me, but his air of smoldering resentment was not directed at me.

  At the time the restaurant at the Inn represented, for me, the apex of public dining. The Inn was a vast, three-story, white clapboard affair with green shutters, a sort of hypertrophied New England whaling captain’s home. The site of generations of family reunions and celebrations, it was a shrine to red meat and brown drinks. The dining rooms were Tudorish, with exposed round beams crisscrossing the white walls, and dim enough to seem candlelit. We sat in black Hitchcock captain’s chairs. Tall as an open newspaper, the menu featured such wonders as filet mignon and veal cordon bleu. Over several Johnnie Walkers, Cordell explained how he had charmed the board out of expelling Will. “Told them I played the ponies from time to time and that in a fit of generosity I’d sent the young scholar my winnings from a trifecta. All small bills—straight from the betting window. And of course I didn’t think it hurt to inquire about fund-raising and finances, given certain family bequests to the old school over the years.”

  “You didn’t have to say anything,” Will said. “Nobody asked you to lie on my behalf.”

  “And if I hadn’t, you’d be out on your fanny.”

  “What if I was dealing drugs? Don’t you even care if I’m guilty?”

  “Would you tell me the truth?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, then, I guess the wise man doesn’t ask.”

  I tried to look like someone who had no particular stake in this conversation. I’ve never considered myself an especially skillful dissembler—though perhaps I am. Will apparently never suspected my involvement. Two weeks later I listened with sympathetic amazement when Will told me that Jessie Petit had been roughed up by the cops and jailed. He couldn’t understand what had gone wrong, because the police were paid off regularly. Someone had targeted them; Will naturally blamed his father.

  “He never liked Jessie; he came with my mother, part of her dowry.” He slapped his hand into the pillow. “Shit, how’d that bastard find out?”

  Lying in my bed across the room, I was grateful he couldn’t see me in the darkness. “How can you be so sure it was your father?”

  “I just know, that’s all.”

  I rolled over and tried to fall asleep. And in the years since, whenever Will seemed to be exaggerating his father’s malevolent influence, I recalled that on this occasion he was right.

  I never did get around to telling Will that his father wrote me a letter of recommendation to Yale, his alma mater. Will himself seemed indifferent to higher education. Bad enough, in his view, that he came from a privileged background. Eventually, in order to get Sipwick the guidance counselor off his back, he applied to Reed and Bennington—the only progressive schools in the country, he boasted, but he had no intention of actually going. He still planned to manage the career of Lester Holmes, with whom he often consulted after supper on the dormitory phone.

  Christmas was enlivened by the news from Bear Track that Elbridge had announced his engagement to Cheryl Dobbs. Returning from break, I settled into my last term, spending most of my time with the lacrosse boys or camped out in the library while Will and his entourage took over the room, discussing Zen Buddhism and the cultural significance of Lash LaRue, attuned to the high-pitched frequency of change and unrest coming from beyond the campus. I didn’t even want to know what drugs they were doing.

  I hardly felt the need to revise my dour opinion when Stubblefield solemnly informed me, the day after Otis Redding’s plane crashed, that he was the greatest singer since Caruso. “And how do we know it was an accident?” he said. “Look at Sam Cooke, man. There’s, like, a pattern there for anybody who wants to see it.” A month before, he’d never heard of Otis Redding or Sam Cooke. Will’s own judgments and pronouncements were rather more temperate by comparison. A great many of the figures he admired were to die abruptly over the next few years, and he always believed that he too would join the ranks of the talented young dead.

  Will was allowed to use one of the music rooms for a kind of memorial service for Otis Redding. Some fifty of our classmates showed up to listen to Will play records and talk about rhythm and blues. I doubt more than half of them had ever heard of Otis, but Will had acquired a reputation as an oracle—or, at the very least, a spectacle. Even the jocks and the young Republicans among us were curious. But it’s also true that Will was canny enough to let it be known that a truckload of ice cream and soft drinks was being delivered to the common room for the occasion. Modest as it was, I suppose this was Will’s first gig as a producer.

  As the ground thawed and the New England mud season approached, I was dismayed to realize that our lives seemed to be diverging irrevocably. One night, when I complained yet again about Stubblefield’s constant presence, Will said, “At least he’s not a fag.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean unlike certain housemasters.”

  “Matson’s not … a fag,” I said, stum
bling over the word partly out of delicacy, partly out of a sudden uncertainty.

  We hardly spoke to each other in the weeks leading up to the spring dance. Girls in white gloves from several nearby private schools were bused in for our wholesome, strictly chaperoned amusement. Will was disdainful of the entire concept.

  I was beating him at squash one day when he said, “You don’t really plan to attend this quaint ritual, do you?”

  “Why not?” I tried to sound casual about it. Puffing from exertion, Will was still limping from his accident; a moment before, I’d felt bad about taking points from him in his convalescent state, but I suddenly wanted to thrash him.

  “It just seems pitiful,” he said.

  “Lately, everything seems pitiful to you.” I dealt up a violent overhead serve, which he bobbled. “Academics, sports, social events—it’s all pathetic.”

  “I’m just asking you not to be a slave to convention, Patrick. If you weren’t so damn smart I wouldn’t care. But you’re trying to buy a ticket on the fucking Titanic, man.”

  I didn’t say anything; it was easy for him, from his privileged position, to devalue the whole social order. I served again; Will ducked just in time.

  “You’re a real quick study, Keane, that’s for sure,” Will said, giving me a look that would linger long after he opened the door and limped off the court.

  The night of the mixer, Matson led a nondancing delegation into town for pizza and a movie. He, too, seemed disappointed that I was bent on attending. But I was eager to celebrate my acceptance to Yale, to claim as my prize the heart of a young princess. To that end, I joined the other young swains in the parking lot outside the auditorium, feeling especially dapper with my new Branford College tie, a gift from Cordell; it had been his college at Yale, and was soon to be mine. At length the buses arrived, two of them, and the girls filed off, holding up their skirts and scanning the mob while we murmured and whistled. Dickinson the math teacher tried to remind us that we were gentlemen.

  “Look at the tits on that,” Trey Bowman said, and suddenly I found myself staring at Lollie Baker, who stood in the door of the bus casting a skeptical eye over all of us, then spotted me and waved.

  If I was ambivalent about our last encounter, torn between a sense of failure and one of pride at my only erotic adventure to date, I was wholly demoralized by Will’s revelation that he’d slept with her.

  Suddenly she was standing in front of me, smiling.

  “Aren’t you-all going to escort me in?” It took me a moment to realize the second-person pronoun wasn’t plural. The increase in my standing among my peers was almost palpable as I offered Lollie my arm, my reservations swept away by a rush of gratitude and pleasure.

  “Studly Keane,” Bowman said, and an envious pall fell over the others as we strolled off to the auditorium.

  Lollie looked much as I remembered her, if perhaps not quite so pretty in reality as in my fantasies. More rounded—Bowman hadn’t been kidding about the tits—but still somehow masculine and angular, even in her pink dress. I had forgotten, or softened, the thin prominent nose which seemed, I now remembered, a projection of her aggressive manner.

  Though I wanted to appear cold and aloof, in fact I was happy to see her and vastly relieved to find a friend amidst the pink and white ranks of the visiting team. When we started to dance I smelled liquor on her breath. Then, after an awkward fox-trot, silently counted out on my part, she said, “Let’s get the hell out of this damn sock hop.” Out in the parking lot the spring air was spiced with the scent of new growth, and darkness was falling. Thinking again of Will’s conquest, I asked—with a marked formality, I thought—how she liked Miss Porter’s.

  “The pits,” she sneered. “A deb factory. A mare farm for Locust Valley and Greenwich and Grosse Pointe. When I first got there my roommate asked me if we wore shoes in the South. I heard that question three times my first year. Louisa May Alcott’s still big in the lit curriculum. The headmistress imagines herself to be the center of this reverential cult, we’re all supposed to just worship her or something, the old prune. Give me a damn break. And a kitchen raid is everybody’s idea of an outrageous good time. I just love the hell out of it,” she concluded.

  She also had a kind word for Yale, when I offhandedly mentioned that I’d been accepted. “The West Point of East Egg,” she observed, although at the time the reference escaped me.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you,” she asked, finally noticing my chilly manner.

  “I thought you might rather be talking to Will than to me,” I said stupidly.

  I’m afraid I’ve never been very good at hiding my feelings; certainly Lollie didn’t need any additional hints.

  “Oh, sugar …” She put her arms around me, drawing a finger-wagging rebuke from Colbert, the earth sciences teacher who was policing the lot.

  “Hell, I grew up with Will,” she said, after Colbert had receded.

  “Oh, well that explains it,” I said bitterly.

  She put her arms around me and pressed her body against mine. “Will’s … just a friend.”

  I snorted. “A friend. Right.”

  “Look, he’s a sad and screwed-up boy,” she said. “And maybe he’s had a harder life than you know. And maybe I just … don’t know. I don’t want to say I feel sorry for him, but I do care for him.”

  I was shocked at this view of Will, whom I considered the most self-assured person I’d ever met. But as soon as she said it I realized she was right, though I couldn’t say exactly how or why.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “I got a flask of good whiskey in my purse. Let’s go back to your room.”

  “The dorm’s off-limits,” I said.

  Lollie rolled her eyes. “Gosh, really?”

  She scanned the quadrangle. “What about the chapel? Maybe you and I could do some serious praying.”

  I had no idea if the chapel was locked or not, but I wasn’t going to blow it this time. She told me to wait for her inside and she’d meet me there in ten minutes. As a boy, it didn’t behoove me to be less daring than she was, and, as Will’s rival, I was emboldened by a sense of competition. I watched her sneak back on the bus before I headed off on a roundabout route to the chapel. The door was open, but as soon as I looked inside I knew I could not go through with the plan. Whether it was the residual sanctity of the place or the simple fear of being caught or perhaps the fear that here, finally, I might be about to lose my own sanctity, I did not want to take Lollie in there. I went outside and waited, half hidden behind a yew.

  Somehow she evaded the cordon of chaperons around the parking lot and ran up the walk, now dressed in a black turtleneck and black capri pants.

  When I hissed her name, she dove on me and kissed me passionately, thrusting her tongue into my mouth. After perhaps a minute of this I told her that the chaplain was inside performing vespers.

  “Shit,” she said. We ducked farther behind the yew, which offered us moderate cover. She sat down in the mulch, her back against the foundation of the chapel, and handed me the flask.

  “What’s so screwed up about Will,” I asked, having gulped as much whiskey as I could.

  “One thing that’s not screwed up about him.” She took a long sip from the flask. “He knows when to talk and when to shut up.”

  At that I rolled on top of her and kissed her violently. For the season the night was chilly, but not excessively so, not for two young bodies stoked with hormones and alcohol. I’ve often wondered, since then, why we couldn’t have stayed where we were, or found a dark patch of lawn or an empty building. But after ten minutes in the bushes my common sense was thoroughly obscured by lust. Going to the room was her idea, but I would have followed her anywhere, obsessed as I was with finishing what we’d started a year and a half before in Memphis.

  We managed somehow to get to the room without being spotted. Matson and the nondancers were still at the movie. Upstairs, we finished the whiskey and were grappling on the bed when Will bur
st in. I was not entirely happy to see him—Lollie had just finished undoing my belt buckle. At the same time I was also relieved, if the truth be told, and I certainly didn’t mind him finding me so successfully engaged.

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “Hey, Will,” Lollie said, as I struggled to extract my hand from the tight elastic of her bra.

  “Matson’s heard there’s a girl in the house,” Will said, “and he’s checking rooms.”

  This news sobered me immediately. With less than three weeks to graduation I saw my academic career, my entire future, snatched away from me.

  “Get in the closet,” Will said. He pulled me off the bed and shoved me in among the clothes, then slid the door shut behind me.

  I heard the knock on the outside door, then Matson’s voice.

  “Mr. Savage, I presume.”

  “Mr. Matson,” Will said, in a courtly tone, “may I present Lollie Baker, of Memphis, Tennessee.”

  “Delighted,” Lollie said.

  I tried to convince myself that Will would talk his way out of it, that his superior rhetorical skills and charm would somehow save him. But even then I knew he was sacrificing himself, and that by remaining in the closet I was allowing him to do so. Though I suppose I might have had the excuse of drunkenness—of not really understanding the consequences when Will shoved me in the closet—in truth I felt acutely, painfully sober as I listened from my hiding place. I became more deeply ashamed of myself with each passing minute, but I stayed put until long after I’d heard Will and Lollie agree to follow Matson downstairs.

  I was still in the closet ten minutes later when Will returned. Opening the door, he said, “All clear,” and flopped on his bed with his hands behind his head.