The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  In his three-piece tweed suit Matson looked smaller and more artificial than I remembered, and I had forgotten the way he wet his lips with his tongue between sentences, a tic that seemed to have become more pronounced in the year since I’d seen him. Though flattered by his visit and eager to show him the campus, I also felt a new sense of equality. We stayed up half the night drinking the single malt and discussing poetry, gradually increasing the volume of the Brandenburg Concertos and the “Moonlight Sonata” as I became increasingly brilliant and vocal, grateful for the opportunity to show myself off. Here was someone who could appreciate my learning and discrimination.

  “I see your taste in music has improved since you’ve been away from Will Savage.” Matson relit his pipe. “His embrace of popular culture and black music was obviously some kind of Oedipal reflex—a blatant attempt to thumb his nose at his family background.”

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t genuinely felt,” I said, the whiskey making me feisty.

  “Oh, I don’t necessarily deny it’s genuinely felt—the great problem with pop culture is that it’s only about feelings. Civilization is constructed on the premise of subjugating the emotions, is it not?”

  “I guess Will would say we’ve become too civilized.”

  Matson laughed. “You can’t be too civilized. Which is not to say I’m in favor of repression. There’s a public, civil self and then there is the private realm, and the twain need never meet. That’s where Will and his fellow primitivists go so wrong, trying to collapse the distinction. Here, for instance, in this room, we happily occupy the private sphere.” And with that he poured us another drink.

  Aaron spent most of his free time with Cameron, the blonde princess of Smith College, until she broke up with him just before midterms. Having felt left behind, I experienced a brief surreptitious thrill when he told me she had refused to come down from her room that Friday when he arrived at her dorm at Smith. When he finally reached her on the phone, she said, without explanation or apology, that she didn’t want to see him anymore.

  We went out and had a good drunk, and all at once our friendship seemed renewed, but for the first time since I’d known him, Aaron began to assert his racial identity. “It’s like, she wants to flirt with the taboo,” he said, “have a taste of the dark meat, but when it’s getting down to summer vacation and Mummy and Daddy and Bar Harbor—hey, we can’t be having no Negro hanging round the yacht club.”

  A few nights later Will called the dorm just as I returned from the library. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot dead at a motel in Memphis. My first thought, after the initial shock, was to wonder how this would affect my friendship with Aaron.

  But Will’s worries were far more apocalyptic. “I know what this is about. My old man and his cronies are behind this.” He claimed that Cordell was involved in a secret, ultra-conservative, white-supremacist network whose tentacles reached from the Tennessee State House to the CIA and the FBI. He raved on for twenty minutes about high-level conspiracies. I didn’t say anything, not wanting to exacerbate this nuttiness.

  When Aaron appeared, shortly after I hung up, it was difficult to know what to say. He threw his books down on the battered trunk that served as our coffee table and fell backward on the couch. I couldn’t read his mood at all.

  “Did you hear,” I asked.

  “Hear what?” he snapped.

  “About Dr. King.”

  “Yeah, I heard.” More than anything he seemed irritated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Why?” he said. “Did you shoot him?” Suddenly he stood up. “I’m beat,” he said, retreating to the bedroom.

  Aaron and I would room together the following year in a suite we shared with two public-school boys, but we were never again as close as we had been that first year. Late that spring he became involved with the Black Alliance and began spending most of his free time with its members. I always wondered if it would have happened anyway, if his sudden discovery of his own people had only to do with having his heart broken by a beautiful blonde, or if it was inevitable, a sign of the times. Sharing quarters in the gorgeously faux-Gothic Branford College, we went out of our way to accommodate each other, like an old married couple honoring a truce in an undeclared war. As room selection approached the following spring, he announced that—no offense, it had been great—but he was rooming with two of the brothers.

  The night after King’s murder Will called back and said without preamble, “There are tanks on the street, man. Fucking tanks. This is it, Patrick, the shit coming down …” He sounded seriously fucked up, high on something. A long silence on his end was underlined by the sound of a vast bellowslike inhalation.

  “You there, Will?”

  “The cities are burning,” he said in a deep, smoked voice. “And all these fucking white people can say is, ‘It’s a shame it had to happen in Memphis, ruin our fair name.’ ”

  “How’s Taleesha bearing up,” I asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Fair name. What fair name?” There was another hiatus. And then, “She’s good, she’s wonderful. She’s a much better person than I am. She’s convinced me not to go out and start shooting white people.”

  “I think she’s right on this one, Will.”

  March 20th 1861 Warmer today. A foretaste of dreadful summer. Mother in bed with her drops. My brother John morose and broody past bearing. After years of roaming woods and field with Clarence, the slave charged with hunting and fishing for our table, he has been told that he must pursue his sport on his own. Clarence has been John’s constant companion for years to a degree that all of us had begun to question; it is one thing for a boy, but John is nearly fifteen and it is time as father says to put away childish things and cultivate the society of his own people. As for the exact circumstances of the estrangement, I have been piecing this together from the reports of the house servants. It seems that Father took the unusual step of selling the woman that Clarence calls his “wife.” Since then the big negro has been exceedingly morose and perhaps as a consequence has withdrawn from all around him but most particularly from John, finally taking the unusual step of requesting that he be allowed to hunt alone, which request seems to have suited Father’s purposes.

  April 13th So we have fired on Fort Sumter and war would appear unavoidable. Father says no good can come of this and thinks the interests of the Delta are best served within the Union.

  I next saw Will and Taleesha in New York; she was performing at Max’s Kansas City, but they were staying uptown, in style, at the St. Regis. Both seemed to have grown into their marital state; she was more confident, at least in that setting, and he was obviously proud of her. She was, I gathered, on her way to becoming a star, and she told me rather breathlessly that two college boys had recognized her on the plane. Even if you didn’t recognize her, she and Will were an extraordinary sight, walking arm in arm up Fifth Avenue: she colossally long-legged in a white minidress, he with his dark hair overflowing the shoulders of a Sergeant Pepperish bright red British army officer’s coat. They seemed to accept the attention they received as tribute. Both would have been conspicuous no matter how they dressed or comported themselves, and so they decided to push it to the limit. It was partly the times, I suppose, and partly Will. He would have hated not to be noticed, and Taleesha, after all, was a performer. And in New York they could flaunt themselves relatively safely, which was not advisable in Memphis.

  New York is a challenge for the exhibitionist: it’s easier to make a U-turn on 42nd Street than it is to turn heads there. And Will and Taleesha turned heads. Alongside a review of Taleesha’s performance, the Village Voice was to run a picture of the two of them: LONG DISTANCE INFORMATION: Soul Diva Taleesha and Music Mogul Will Savage, of Memphis. This was probably the first time Will was referred to as a mogul, and the first evidence I had that the world might take him at his own—and my—valuation.

  I met them in the King Cole bar at the St. Regis; brilliant as
tropical birds amidst the gray-suited businessmen, they looked as if they might have just stepped out of the Maxfield Parrish mural on the wall behind the bar.

  Will rose to greet me, enfolding me in a bearish embrace. “Hey, if isn’t old Dink Stover from Yale. What’s the word, Dink? How does your ivy grow? You get that record I sent you?”

  Of course I hadn’t. Will was a fount of good intentions, but his attention was easily distracted and he didn’t yet have the staff to implement his whims before he forgot them. He was stoned on something, the brilliant focus of his gaze slightly diffused, talking animatedly about a singer he’d just discovered, running down a disc jockey who’d failed to give Taleesha enough play even after Will had plied him with a gold Rolex President. “I bought a damn gross of the fuckers in the last year,” he complained. “All these hip DJs gotta have their big old tacky Presidents.”

  Taleesha listened to her husband with an air of amused pride, occasionally spraying down the flames of Will’s hyperbole. Everyone in the room seemed to be watching his performance, certain only that a rare beast was among them.

  Downstairs in the mens room, a man asked me if I was sitting with one of the Beatles.

  I had meant to ask Will if he had ever read the diary of Binnie Pilcher Savage; having read it carefully, I was curious about his motives in giving it to me. But before I’d gotten around to it I made the mistake of asking if he’d had any contact with his parents.

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of direct communication,” he said, smiling expansively. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if I hear from my old man soon. I’ve written a letter to the U.S. attorney general’s office proposing him as a prime suspect in the King assassination.”

  Taleesha rolled her eyes for my benefit and stroked Will’s arm soothingly.

  “Jesus, Will,” I said. “Maybe you should stop projecting your problems with your dad onto the global scene.”

  “Maybe you should just suck my dick, Patrick.”

  Taleesha said, “Don’t talk like that to your best friend.”

  “Who said he’s my best friend?”

  “You did. Lots of times.”

  “I must have been stoned.”

  “No,” said Taleesha. “You? Stoned? I can’t imagine.”

  She was bantering Will out of his mood, but I felt as if I’d been slapped. Pushing my drink away, I stood up and stalked off in a huff.

  Taleesha caught up with me in the lobby and clutched my arm. “Patrick, you can’t go. He’ll be miserable, and then I’ll be miserable. If nothing else, please stay for me. You know how he is.”

  I did know how he was. And of course I stayed—to listen to Will explain the conspiracies, the hidden springs and trapdoors of the body politic … stayed to hear Taleesha sing that night to an enthusiastic crowd of shaggy cognoscenti—because at that moment in the lobby of the St. Regis I couldn’t help being a little bit in love with her, if only because she was my best friend’s wife, imagining in that first moment of real intimacy how I would comfort her at Will’s funeral and take care of her, until, drawn to me initially by our mutual love of Will Savage, deceased, she would eventually realize that she loved me, possibly more, even, than she’d loved Will, though we would both always respect the memory of her love for Will.

  With such ludicrous, morbid fantasies did I fool myself, and while away the long mud season of my unwanted chastity.

  XII

  “Hey, boy,” drawls the unfamiliar, disembodied voice. “You know what we do to nigger-loving, longhair scum?”

  Unconsciously, I have answered the ringing phone. I stare into the dark, while the voice, dry and spiked as a thistle, goes on to describe a crude, if specific, surgical procedure. “… Tell you what, your brother weren’t no accident. You best watch your ass or we ’gone burn it up.” At this point I hang up the phone and grope for the bedside light.

  Five in the morning. I’m nauseous, in part from the motion of the water bed rolling and sloshing beneath me. I am, I discern, in Will’s house in Memphis. The call was intended for my host, who at the moment is at large.

  By the spring of my sophomore year Will and I had fallen into a routine in which I’d write regularly and he’d call whenever the inspiration seized him. One afternoon in May I’d just returned from the stacks in Sterling when I was summoned to the phone. Taleesha had never called before, and I soon wished she didn’t have occasion to, now. Distraught, she informed me Elbridge had died behind the wheel of Will’s car. She hadn’t seen or heard from Will in the two days since he’d learned about the accident. “I thought maybe he would have called you,” she said hopefully.

  I then spent a sleepless night attempting to study for my philosophy exam the next morning and to convince myself I couldn’t possibly go to Memphis. As usual I didn’t have the airfare; what I did have, in addition to the test, was a term paper in English.

  First thing the next morning, I found Professor Egan, my English professor, in his office. He caressed the edition of the bard’s sonnets I handed him as if it were a living thing—the same appreciative touch with which he stroked his own beard in class. Finally, delicately, he coaxed it open and turned to the title page, which he rubbed between his fingers. He granted me an extension on my final paper. I staggered off to take my exam, an exercise in automatic writing, and afterward met Egan at his bank, where he gave me two hundred dollars in cash.

  Though this was the year of hijackings, I made Memphis without incident. At the airport, Taleesha was waiting for me at the gate. She looked older, as though she had suddenly become a woman with adult anxieties and responsibilities in the year since I had last seen her. We embraced awkwardly—somewhere between a hug and a handshake, and I wondered what local protocol governed how a black girl and a white boy should walk to the car.

  Outside the air-conditioned terminal, it was warm and muggy as only Memphis can be. Once we were sealed in the car—a green Dodge Charger I’d never seen before—I finally asked what had happened.

  “I guess you heard,” she began, “about Elbridge getting kicked out of Sewanee for smoking pot. He was getting pretty far out there, hanging out with the Bitter Lemon crowd, doing acid. When L.B. got his induction notice Will started begging him to go to Canada. Night before he’s supposed to report for his physical he comes to Will and asks to borrow Will’s car—he wrapped his little sports car around a tree the week before. And now he’s high as a kite. Will asks if he’s going to Canada and L.B. says he’s going to fly away. Those were his words, Will said. Fly away. He’d gotten weird, lately. So Will gives him the keys to his Packard, asks him if he needs money, wishes him Godspeed. This is maybe midnight. Next we hear—it seems about three a.m. he’s trying to outrun a police car and he hit a tree doing over ninety miles an hour.”

  An unidentified witness had been quoted in the paper that morning claiming the crash had been preceded by an exchange of gunfire. Even before he heard the details, Will was convinced that the police had been after him, in his well-known vehicle. He blamed himself for what had happened.

  “After he heard, he threw a chair through the back window of the house,” Taleesha said. “Then he punched the wall so hard he broke his hand. And after he’d hurt himself enough to stand it, then he called up his daddy. And not his daddy nor his mama would come to the phone. I guess they blame Will too. Who can know, a family like that? Half hour later he took off without a word and I haven’t seen him since.”

  Taleesha slapped the steering wheel in frustration. “It would be hard enough if Will was an easy person to live with,” Taleesha complained, nearly rear-ending the car in front of us, lurching into the passing lane at the last minute as I jammed my feet into the floor in front of me. “I’m trying to convince him to move to Chicago or New York.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Will says the music is here. He says Memphis has the groove. I don’t know. It’s an excuse. It’s bullshit. I think he likes the conflict. He needs to have the enemy around him, within
range. Including his crazy family. Especially his crazy family. And here we are in lovely Germantown.”

  We were driving through rolling countryside now, just off the interstate, past horse farms and broad rolling pastures which sprouted the occasional big, showy house of recent construction, which, for all its stridency and even ugliness, mimicked the antebellum plantation house and reflected the essentially conservative aspirations of new money.

  Will’s new house, visible from a great distance across a hay field, was so incongruous it might have dropped out of the sky. It was a fantastic sight, the roofline turreted and crenellated and arched against the horizon, seeming to combine Moorish, Tuscan and Bavarian motifs, like something designed by Antoni Gaudí on assignment for Walt Disney.

  “You believe this shit?” said Taleesha, with an air of one long suffering, as we approached the gate and turned into the long drive. They’d been living in a small farmhouse on the property during the construction of this implausible residence, which after a year was nearly complete. Two workmen were perched on scaffolding, finishing off a section of mosaic which constituted part of the variegated skin of the edifice.

  Parked near the house was a cement mixer, which at first glance seemed part of the construction site. But it was painted black, and a second look showed Plexiglas windows set in the sides of the drum. Seeing the target of my gaze, Taleesha walked me over to the machine.

  “He has himself driven around town in the thing,” she said, gesturing toward the ladder. I climbed up and opened a hatch in the back to discover a chamber with two couches, carpeted with kilims, hung with dark paisley fabric.

  The house was no less bizarre. She took me on the grand tour, a bemused chatelaine attempting to do justice to her husband’s stupendous folly. I recognized Will in every room, or rather, I began to see the elements of what would become his imperial style: a kind of haute-hippie, opium-den look in which Indian, Ottoman, William Morris Arts and Crafts and medieval decor all seemed congruous, held together if nothing else by the sheer force of Will’s enthusiasm. It was a nighttime aesthetic, all heavy velvet drapes, intricate burgundy carpets and dark carved wood, painted mandalas and carved heraldic shields. The sun was not meant to penetrate far into these rooms, not even the huge common rooms—the oval ballroom with its Baccarat chandelier, the dining room with its massive ebony table, and especially not the play room, also known as the drug room, with a Berber nomad’s tent standing in the middle, tent spikes nailed into the wooden floor.