The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  “And of course,” he sneered, “there’s the racial question.”

  “That’s the least of it,” I lied. A counterattack suggested itself. “Is that why you’re marrying her? Because she’s black?”

  “Fuck you, Patrick.”

  “It is a great way to say ‘Fuck you’ to everybody, isn’t it? A great big statement—”

  “If you don’t want to be my witness—”

  “I’ll be your witness,” I shouted. “I’ll follow you off a cliff if you want me to.”

  I paused, wary of Will’s rage; it was always near the surface, and another sharp cut would have unleashed it. Softly, I said, “Just tell me what I’m witnessing.”

  He settled back into his chair, swallowed half a mug of ale. “Look,” he said, “I just know this is right. Okay? I feel it all the way down. You know I operate on instinct. Taleesha’s what I want in my life and marrying her’s the right thing. Her old man’s very religious, and she has pretty strong spiritual convictions herself. It’s gonna be hard enough living together. But being married will make it easier.”

  “What about your family?”

  “They’ll learn to live with it,” he said. “Or they won’t.”

  Taleesha returned cautiously to the table. “I stayed in there about as long as I could,” she said.

  I rose from my seat. “Congratulations.”

  She took my hands and I leaned forward, and upward, to kiss her cheek.

  Will reminded me that one does not congratulate the bride, that the groom is presumed to be the lucky one, citing polite convention even as he prepared to fly in the face of all of his breeding and upbringing.

  “I told the boy—‘You’re crazy,’ ” Taleesha said apologetically. “I tried to talk him out of it. Tried and tried.”

  Will nodded happily. “She did.”

  “But he loves trouble.”

  “Just paying my dues.”

  I had never seem him giddy before. It was, on him, a bizarre mood to behold.

  “I still think we should keep it a secret,” Taleesha said, “least for a while.”

  “Why the fuck should we,” Will declared. “I’m not ashamed.”

  “No, of course not,” she said, puckering her lips at him. “But has it ever occurred to you I might be? What do you suppose my friends are gonna say? ‘Shit girl, you gonna marry a white man?’”

  Her humor and her prudence would serve them well, I thought. Will had little of either. I ordered a bottle of champagne, something I’d never done before. When Will went to the men’s room I asked Taleesha how her family was likely to react.

  “Well, my mama isn’t likely to know. And Daddy don’t approve of anything, he’s real old-fashioned. Momma used to sing the blues, but he made her give it up when they got married. She tried, I guess, but when I was seven she up and ran off—just disappeared.”

  As if to make light of this fact, she suddenly adopted a breezier tone.

  “Daddy’s always been kind of high hat, anyway. A pillar of the black community, and all that, very—I don’t know—white in his behavior, and even though he’d never admit it he’s secretly proud as hell of his light skin, he’s about three shades lighter than me. His great-granddaddy was probably some white planter in Greenwood, Mississippi. But that doesn’t mean he believes the races should mix any more than Will’s father does. In his own way he’s as conservative as an old peckerwood.”

  Will returned, seeming a little stoned, a little broader of smile. After the champagne arrived I toasted their future—imagining their love as a noble cause, a force for healing the jagged rift across the face of our land.

  What can I say—we were all very young at the time.

  They dropped me off at the Yale Club, and I watched the cab pull away, feeling the bittersweet loneliness of the city as the champagne faded from the sooty canyon of Vanderbilt Avenue. In the bar upstairs I might find company, but I chose to indulge my solitude and wander uptown. At that time, before catalytic converters, the New York air was an even thicker medium than it is today, granular and purple with petrochemical by-products and particulates. You could practically taste it. Under-dressed for the evening chill in my tweed jacket, I saw myself, not unhappily, as a poignant figure, a mendicant wandering the cosmopolitan streets where no one knew me, no one waited for me.

  The city was an ontological challenge, defying you to prove that you existed.

  Someday these would be my streets. Meanwhile, I found myself on Fifth Avenue, moving with a crowd admiring the lavish windows of Saks. And suddenly I was in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The city of my aspirations was a godless metropolis composed largely of Protestant landmarks—the University Club, the Stock Exchange, the Plaza Hotel—and encountering this monument to my native faith was something like spotting one’s parents in the midst of an orgy.

  I climbed the steps and joined the few souls within, dipping my hands in the holy water and blessing myself, genuflecting in the aisle and kneeling with my head in my hands, listening to the rustling echo of whispering voices. Raised a strict Catholic, I no longer had quite enough faith to pray for myself, but I said a prayer for Will and his fiancée and lit a candle for them on the way out.

  The next morning—an overcast day threatening rain. I shivered nervously outside the club, surveying the grimy west flank of Grand Central. They arrived twenty minutes late in a chauffeured Rolls. Even as Will handed me a glass of champagne I couldn’t shake the thought that someone was going to try to stop us. Taleesha seemed as nervous as me, all scrunched up inside her lanky self, wearing a smart, proper white suit with a hat and veil. But Will was as flamboyant as the brightly striped gambler’s vest he wore beneath an ancient morning suit complete with silk top hat.

  We climbed out of the limousine in front of a dour, block-long office building which hardly answered my Jeffersonian notion of city hall. Inside, we followed the ruffled shirts and the white dresses to the appropriate office. Seeing the lines in front of the registration windows, Will seemed to experience a moment of doubt about the demotic venue. I paced back and forth, unconsciously guarding the door and admiring in this drab and soulless setting the physical and sartorial variety of the matrimonial candidates: an Indian woman in a chartreuse sari and her bridegroom in white; a black man in a pink tuxedo that matched his bride’s dress; a pale, trembling Slavic bride in a beaded floor-length gown with tight braids and flowers coiled atop her head.

  When we finally entered the so-called chapel a hush fell over the half-dozen wedding parties, followed by furtive glances and whispered comments. I wanted to tell them to mind their own goddamned business, but I realized this was only the preview. Will and Taleesha were about to embark on a lifetime of being noticed. Will had long since gone silent and drawn into himself, a dangerous sign. Taleesha looked miserable.

  Finally their names were called. As we rose and stood up before the judge, the voices subsided once again. Will looked back and scanned the faces in the room, as if to demand in advance whether anyone knew any reason why he and his bride should not be united in matrimony. Taleesha’s hands, clutching a bouquet to her chest, were trembling. Will leaned over and kissed Taleesha’s neck, then nodded defiantly to the judge.

  The service itself took only a couple of minutes. When the judge said, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” everyone in the room seemed paralyzed, including the newlyweds. Neither of them moved until a voice called out, “Right on,” breaking the silence and sparking a volley of applause that continued as the bride and groom—as if awakened from a spell—finally turned toward each other and kissed.

  We walked out between the rows of folding chairs. It was a fairly extraordinary eruption—perhaps a dozen couples and their witnesses clapping and cheering, the black man in the pink tuxedo shaking Will’s hand and slapping Taleesha on the back, escorting them to the door with a bright proprietary air, a benevolent stranger launching them into their hazardous new life.

  “Peace, brother and sister.
”

  “Be cool,” Will said.

  “We did it,” Will said uncertainly, as the driver closed the door behind us. He opened another bottle of champagne and poured each of us a glass.

  “Oh, shit, Will,” Taleesha said, “are you sure?” She was dazed, not certain whether she should allow herself to be happy.

  He said, “Sure as I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “Well,” she said, “we all better fasten our seat belts and hold on is all I can say.”

  Will leaned over and kissed her again, licking the champagne from her lips. “Let us not forget our best man,” he said. Taleesha removed from her purse a tissue-wrapped package, which proved to consist of two leather-bound volumes. The first was the 1909 Doves Press edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in full vellum with gilt title. “I’m afraid the actual first edition proved a little beyond my means,” Will said. “Just promise me you won’t show it to Matson.”

  The second volume was a notebook of some sort. Opening it up, I read, on the brittle title page, handwritten in sepia ink: BINNIE PILCHER SAVAGE, HER PRIVATE DIARY, 15 FEB 1861 A.D.—

  “You told me you were thinking of majoring in history. Well, there’s a little piece of history you might find of some interest.”

  Despite my protests that it belonged to his family, he insisted I keep it.

  “It’s better off with you,” he said, with a cryptic smile.

  They dropped me at the club; I had a paper to finish so I would never know how sweet Taleesha sounded at the Apollo on her wedding night. The next day they were on their way to Paris for their honeymoon. It seemed there should be something more than this dangling curbside parting to publicly mark the beginning of their wedded life; I suddenly understood the purpose of the big wedding with its sense of communal witness and closure.

  As the limousine pulled away they were snuggled—or was it huddled?—together in the backseat, but as I rattled toward New Haven in the cigarette-stinking train, I couldn’t shake a plummeting feeling of anxiety for their future.

  XI

  The Saturday after the two detectives interviewed me about Felson, a young man came calling on my daughter for her first date. My wife, Stacey, was picking up our youngest from her playdate. I was already in a morbid frame of mind; Felson’s funeral was scheduled for the following Monday. At that moment in particular you’d think I would have been reassured by the sight of the handsome boy who arrived at our door in his blue blazer and chinos. Except for the annoying backward baseball cap, he was the very image of the boy I’d always wanted to be; and the cap was itself testament to his insouciance, his easy certainty of his place in the world, which allowed him to affect the generational flourish. I’d already heard his vitae, and the surname announced by our doorman was one that would have been familiar to Edith Wharton. His father had a seat on the exchange, his mother served on several boards with Stacey, and the young master himself attended Buckley. Of course I disliked him immediately.

  True, my whole life had been directed toward acquiring just this sort of escort for my daughter, but suddenly that seemed like a sad, even shameful, realization.

  He looked me in the eye, shook my hand firmly and removed the stupid cap at the threshold. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Keane.”

  We sat in the library and talked about the prep schools he was applying to, while Caroline strategically postponed her entrance. She finally appeared in the doorway wearing jeans and a faded denim shirt over what appeared to be a tie-dyed T-shirt, her wrists adorned with colorful string bracelets she’d woven at camp last summer. It’s been several years now since I had any input in the matter of her wardrobe and I have learned not to try. But what really got to me somehow was the beaded choker she wore around her neck, from which dangled a bronze peace sign. She looked like one of the groupies that used to attach themselves to Will. Like them, the stoned chicks I met backstage with Will, Caroline was a vegetarian prone to lecture me about health and ecology.

  Trying to be a semi-cool dad, I squelched the reflex to inquire into their plans. But if my restraint was noted, I was not rewarded with the customary kiss on the cheek.

  Although I almost never take a drink before six, I mixed myself a scotch and soda after Caroline and her date hurriedly departed. It would be at least an hour before Stacey came home. Not that talking to my wife would help. Suddenly I thought of calling Lollie Baker, whom I hadn’t spoken to in more than a year. I dialed information in Los Angeles and then called the Chateau Marmont, the return address of her last Christmas card. Lollie had been living in Los Angeles for more than three years—doctoring scripts for obscene wages, procrastinating the commencement of her fourth play—but she continued to live in a hotel, as if to proclaim her transient status.

  “ ’ello, Chateau.” The voice, which I recognized from my last call, suggested a curious amalgam of doped languor and haughtiness. When I asked for Lollie and was told that she was not on the premises, the tone of the response seemed to hint that even if she were, it is unlikely that she would wish to receive my call.

  Then I called Will in Malibu. I didn’t want to talk about anything special, certainly not about the sources of my dark mood. Small talk was what I needed, pleasant and aimless distraction. Will’s line was answered by a surly character, one of his functionaries, who said Will was out of town and asked, when I tried to find out where, what my call was in reference to.

  “It’s in reference to my life, smart-ass,” I said, and slammed down the receiver.

  For almost thirty years, through all the erratic twists and turns of his curious journey, I’ve always sensed that Will was out there somewhere, and that I would hear from him in due course, but just at that moment I would have liked to verify it.

  After the wedding, Will had checked in from the Crillon in Paris. “Fat, happy and disinherited,” he pronounced himself. The night before, he said, they’d hooked up with two of the Rolling Stones, one of whom was smitten with Taleesha. Before that they’d been in Morocco, where Will had recorded some of the native music and smoked an immense quantity of hashish.

  Cordell was drinking scotch, I would guess, when he called a month later to inform me “just for the record” that Will had disgraced the family and was henceforth no son of his. He did not refer to my part in this travesty, or ask about my knowledge, and I certainly didn’t volunteer any information. But as I listened I couldn’t help feeling chastised. “His mother is absolutely devastated,” he said; apparently, if I could take his word on the subject of his wife’s feelings, horror over Will’s marriage apparently was one of the few things they’d been able to agree upon in years. “Bad enough Elbridge getting kicked out of Sewanee for damn marijuana and liable to get drafted any minute. Get himself killed in Viet-fuckingnam unless I can pull strings to keep him stateside. Then … this. And Will actually has the balls to stay on in Memphis. He’s bought a big piece of land in Germantown, not ten miles from where I sit—planning on building some goddamn eyesore is what I hear.”

  He paused to take a drink. “Tell me this, Patrick. Would you say he did this thing specifically to mortify his mother and father. Was that the primary motive here?”

  Not the primary motive perhaps, though surely not irrelevant. “I think … think he’s in love.” I knew this would not be a popular answer.

  “Don’t give me that shit, Patrick. You’re pissing me off now. Would that be your intention, here?”

  I couldn’t imagine anyone but Will who would go out of his way to piss Cordell Savage off.

  “Does he think the two of them can just walk around the streets holding hands? That the decent people he was raised among are going to stand for this?”

  “I really don’t know, sir.”

  “Because they’re not.”

  I didn’t ask what, precisely, the decent people of Memphis were going to do. I listened patiently, and conceded that it was a difficult and even a foolish course that Will had chosen, and then I resumed my safe and cloistered pursuit of L
ight and Truth.

  BINNIE PILCHER SAVAGE, HER DIARY

  Bear Track March 11th 1861

  Just returned from a splendid frolic at the Harkness place in Washington County. Accompanied by twelve fiddlers danced till the daylight with Tom Cook, Griffin Trenholm, James Harkness favoring the latter, and a half a dozen other young gentlemen. My sister Juliana of course was there with her new husband and I flatter myself that she was a little jealous of the attention I received; the role wife sits somewhat uncomfortably on one who so brilliantly played the coquette, which part now falls to me. A midnight feast of roast beef, bear, venison, oysters, chicken salad, jelly, charlotte, pound cakes, sponge cake, figs, dates, oranges and nuts. There were gallons of eggnog and champagne and many of the young men had brought their own whiskey with the result that several of them were hardly fit for dancing or conversation. The house, newly finished, is alleged to have cost more than fifty thousand with furnishings, quite the melange of architectural styles, betraying elements Florentine, Greek, French and what I can only describe as hill country rustic. The furnishings, though, all from France and Italy, were worthy of one of the great houses of Charleston. We are gradually civilizing this wilderness.

  The young Harkness boy lured me out to the garden near dawn and then seemed not to know how to press his advantage until I finally pretended to stumble on the path and topple directly into his arms. This after young Trenholm lost consciousness on the veranda. I like a gentleman as well as the next girl, but I think our local swains carry their diffidence too far. Juliana discovered me in the garden being kissed, but I have no doubt her look of disapproval reflected more jealousy than censure. In any event, I am safe on that flank, ever since I found her with Mulligan the overseer.

  Matson came to New Haven to visit that spring. Bearing a bottle of single-malt scotch, he arrived on a Friday night shortly after Aaron had decamped for Smith. After a white-clam pizza downtown, we sat in the living room which Aaron and I had turned into a gallery of posters and lithographs: Picasso, Giacometti, Braque, Buffet, Huey Newton on his rattan chair throne and Raquel Welch in a revealing bearskin wrap from the movie One Million Years B.C.