The Last of the Savages

by Jay McInerney

  XXII

  I didn’t see Will again until he came to New York nearly two years later. By then, he and Taleesha were living in Santa Monica and Stacey was pregnant. I chose to attribute her bad mood to that fact; she was appalled that I was going out to dinner with Will. “After that awful speech he made at our wedding.” I finally had to explain that it was business, which was only partly true.

  Will had agreed to meet me at the Quilted Giraffe at nine-thirty. By the time he showed up at ten-forty I was nursing my third scotch. Draped in black, gargantuan in girth, he walked unsteadily toward the table, escorted by a nervous maître d’.

  “Good thing for you I’m not billing these hours,” I said.

  I don’t think he heard me. He hugged me, his face slick with sweat, then lit a cigarette and ordered a double vodka. When the drink arrived he used it to wash down a fistful of pills.

  “Dont worry, Pat. Just vitamins.” He winked.

  When I inquired, he told me that business was terrific, and for the first time I didn’t believe him. He protested too much. And I detected a lesion of his old self-assurance. Ordering a second vodka, he informed the waiter that he was a vegetarian, but it hardly mattered since he ignored the food when it arrived, and I could only wonder how he had managed to get so big.

  When I asked about Taleesha, he fell silent and puffed away at his cigarette. “We lost one,” he said.

  “Lost what?”

  “She had a miscarriage.”

  “God, Will. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Just as well,” he said gruffly. “I’m not sure I particularly want to continue the bloodline.”

  By now he’d had several drinks. “Can you imagine how fucked up my kid would be,” he asked, loudly enough to draw the attention of nearby diners. When he lit up a joint, the waiter very politely asked us to leave, but Will ignored him. The manager was somewhat less polite.

  “Come hear some music,” he said, when we were out on the sidewalk, his hand seizing my biceps like a bear trap. “Iggy’s playing downtown.” His driver came around and opened the door of the Rolls.

  “Will, I can’t afford to get busted, and Stacey’s home vomiting,” I snapped, regretting it immediately. Feeling guilty about our reproductive success, I added, “Okay, let’s go. Just for an hour.”

  By the time the car pulled to a stop in front of a club downtown, my mood had shifted from guilt to anxiety about the time and about Stacey’s condition. Out on the sidewalk, at least a hundred scruffy kids were clustered on the otherwise deserted streets in postures of jaded yearning. On the steps above them, a white man in a black leather jacket and beret played the role of Saint Peter, standing guard in front of the steel door. The crowd, registering the arrival of Will’s limo, parted grudgingly as he lurched forward into its midst—recognizing the air of entitlement, if not the face—closing in again before I had a chance to follow.

  “Will Savage,” he called to the doorman.

  “Will what?”

  “I’m Will Savage,” he repeated, as a young woman with a clipboard appeared in the doorway

  “You on the list,” she asked.

  “Fuck the list.”

  “Sorry,” the woman said. “I don’t see your name here.”

  “He knows the owner,” I called out, hoping to spare him further erosion of his pride.

  “Who doesn’t?” said the doorman. Skepticism seemed to consolidate the individuals on the sidewalk, a chorus of sardonic laughter rising from the pack.

  “Just let me in,” Will bellowed, lurching toward the door. When the guy in the beret clutched Will from behind, three kids in front of the line bolted through the door. Locked in struggle, Will and the doorman tumbled down the steps, cursing each other. When the doorman started punching Will I shoved my way through the crowd and grabbed his arm.

  Then an authoritative voice cut through the bedlam.

  “Hey, enough already.” This man clearly ran the club; he ran down the steps and pried the doorman away from Will, who slumped down on the sidewalk furious and spent, like a baited bear.

  “Will, Jesus,” he said, “what the fuck’s going on? Look, I’m sorry, but you gotta understand …” An emaciated Englishman with cockney vowels, he did not elaborate, nor did he seem entirely happy to see his old friend Will Savage.

  Will rose unsteadily, righting himself with effort. “Duncan,” he said. But the simple act of recognition exhausted him, so I went over and took his arm, guiding him to the car. He didn’t seem to know where he was. For my part, I did not want to witness any of this.

  Duncan followed us to the car. “You want to come in, I can give you some drink tickets.”

  Waving him away, I pulled the door closed behind us. I didn’t think the evening could get any worse, but Will seemed determined to destroy everything in his path.

  “Kind of ironic,” he said, “you having a kid. Back at school, I didn’t know just how incredibly fucking appropriate that was—you hiding in the closet.”

  The night was already so disastrous that I could hardly summon any further embarrassment. All I wanted was to be home.

  I left Will at his hotel after arranging with the concierge to have a doctor sent to check on him. I felt like one of Noah’s children watching the patriarch lurch drunk and naked around his tent. It was as if, on the brink of fatherhood, I had felt the chill breath of doom.

  Three months later I sent out announcements of our daughter Caroline’s birth. I hesitated before addressing one to Will and Taleesha. I received a hearty note of congratulations from Cordell Savage, along with a Georgian baby spoon and dealer’s certificate vouching that it was made by Hester Bateman. And in due course there was a mono-grammed cashmere blanket and a note—“With love from the two of us”—from Taleesha.

  For the first time since I had known him, I imagined myself to be looking down on Will from the high plateau of fortune. I can’t say I relished this unaccustomed perspective, though I couldn’t help positing a kind of moral balance sheet in which Will was finally being called to account. And I couldn’t shake the peculiar notion that somehow our fortunes were inversely related, that the tortoise was finally claiming the prize. Stacey and I had bought a nine-room apartment on Park Avenue after having survived the intense scrutiny of one of the city’s more formidable co-op boards, and within a year we would buy a weekend place in Connecticut; I was a new father, making more money than anyone had ever heard of before the eighties—though not half as much as Will pissed away in the seventies.

  Checking with a Harvard classmate who was now an entertainment lawyer, I learned that Will was struggling to regain his relevance, that he was considered something of a relic at best, a wreck at worst. “Don’t sugarcoat it for me, Tom,” I said, irritated by his exuberant Schadenfreude. It was one thing for me to condescend—I was Will’s best friend.

  “Hey, man,” he asked. “Is it true that he’s the father of Aretha’s kids?”

  “Tom,” I said. “I heard he’s the father of your kids.”

  I kept meaning to call, but with each passing month it became harder, particularly after I heard, through Lollie, that Taleesha had suffered a second miscarriage. I imagined Will hiding out, licking his wounds. Sometimes I would think of him as a bearded guerrilla chieftain—resting in the hills between battles, planning his next campaign. When, a year after Taleesha’s note, I finally dialed, a functionary said that Will was in London on business and that Taleesha was away on holiday. I had my secretary make a note on the calendar to phone three weeks later, when they were scheduled to return, but I was called out of town the day before.

  The days disappear like newspapers, seasons like the leaves and snow. I was working harder than ever, devoting what was left of my time and concern to my new family. In the middle years, time can seem to stand still even as it relentlessly carries us away. And then one day the secret clock of our life tolls, and time starts up again.

  Early one morning Savage père called me at my offi
ce. “How’s the great white hunter,” he asked, with what sounded like forced jauntiness. “I don’t guess I’ll ever forget the surprise on your face when your first duck fell out of the sky.”

  “I was even more surprised than he was,” I said. “How’s Cheryl,” I asked, inadvertently touching his sore spot.

  “Well, it’s funny you should ask, Patrick.” There was a long, transatlantic pause. “Is there any chance this line is secure?” he whispered. Once I would have considered this an absurd question, but since our firm had begun to get involved in mergers and acquisitions, some of them hostile, we had our lines swept regularly for bugs. “Can you be on the Concord this morning,” he asked. “Of course I’ll pay your retainer and expenses.”

  It was out of the question; I had meetings and clients … but six hours later I was sitting in the library of the house in Eaton Square. Looking at Cordell, I calculated the time that had passed since I had seen him, so much had he seemed to age. His temples had gone gray and his neck was shrunken and wattled. I’d never thought of him as having a particular age, but I realized then that he was well over sixty.

  The butler brought me tea. Cordell was drinking scotch, and looked as if he’d been at it for days. “Please close the doors on your way out,” he ordered. After the butler had sealed us in, he sighed and leaned back in his chair. “All my life I’ve tried to control my environment and the people around me. I don’t believe that we were put on this earth to emulate the anarchy of nature, but to tame it. Will and his friends were always talking about liberation. But you and I—we know that control is what matters.”

  This wild conjunction of the personal and the metaphysical reminded me of no one so much as Will. Rather than point this out, however, I waited for Cordell to cut to the chase.

  “A week ago,” he began, “I sent Cheryl off to Saint-Tropez in the company of her hairdresser, who’s her best friend and more or less a paid companion. Paid by me,” he added. “In fact, I paid her to keep an eye on Cheryl, if you know what I mean. Cheryl wasn’t very good at making friends here. You know the English, not exactly the warmest race on the planet. And Cheryl, with her background, was always self-conscious. If there has been a blot on our happiness … well, anyway, I hired a friend for her.” He seemed to be pleading for a generous interpretation of this domestic espionage. “When I saw that she responded to Dora, the hairdresser, I put her on the payroll. To keep Cheryl company, and to keep me abreast. You’re shocked, I can see—”

  I shook my head in defense of my own worldliness, and my broad allowances for Savage behavior.

  “An older man married to a younger woman, his own eyes aren’t what they used to be—so he pays someone else to watch. And you trust her to protect your interests, goddamnit. Foolish of me. It’s the inherent dilemma of espionage—the suspicious mind needs to trust its spies. I suppose Will told you I was OSS during the war? No? At any rate, someone turned my agent, my Cockney hairdresser. Obviously someone else was paying her more than I was. Not knowing this, I sent them off to Saint-Tropez together. I was planning to join them once I’d attended to some business here in London.”

  Usually, he told me, one or the other phoned in every day from the hotel. Cordell wasn’t alarmed when a day went by, but after two days without word he called and discovered they’d checked out. The next day he received an anonymous call and then, twenty-four hours later, a package of photographs and an audiocassette graphically documenting Cheryl’s dalliance with a sailing instructor.

  “Whatever you may think of my May-December marriage,” he said, once he’d collected himself, “I love my wife and I am deeply wounded by this. I know Will and his mother have demonized me. They think I ran away with Cheryl out of some monstrous perversity, as if I’d always dreamed of stealing off with my dead son’s girlfriend. But I fell in love with Cheryl in spite of that fact, not because of it.” He looked stricken, as if he had suddenly allowed himself to imagine that this wasn’t true, that in fact there might have been some monstrous and perverse aspect to his attraction. “God forgive me if that’s not the truth.”

  He drained his scotch in a single gulp. I could see his inward gaze swivel outward, as if he had turned away from whatever black truth he may have seen in his soul and was searching for others to blame for his present unhappiness. “If they imagine it was easy or pleasant to give up everything of value in my life and begin again, well, they are gravely mistaken. I wasn’t happy about ripping apart what was left of my family. But I’d lost … lost two sons. I suffered, too.”

  “I’m sure you did,” I said, more out of polite reflex than conviction. Though there was a chance he was completely sincere, I couldn’t help wondering if he’d noticed his suffering before Cheryl bailed out.

  He saw this in my face and it seemed to steel him. “Leaving my feelings aside, there is the question of what has to be done. That’s why you’re here,” he said, in a tone that reasserted command and reminded me that I was, after all, an employee. “I don’t know how familiar you are with Fleet Street tabloids, Patrick, but they’re shameless sons of bitches. And these blackmailing scum have threatened to distribute the pictures to the press. Along with some speculation about my business dealings—which is their real interest. I don’t flatter myself that my private affairs are of burning interest to the public, but in conjunction with the names of some of my associates I’m afraid it would be a great three-day sensation and it would ruin me and many others. The repercussions would be … let’s just say, extensive.”

  “Who are they,” I asked, “these blackmailers?” I was trying not to sound skeptical. “What is it they want?”

  “Who is the sixty-thousand-dollar question. What they want is for me to refrain from a certain transaction. They’re also demanding hush money of a million cash. But the deal is worth much more than that and it’s part of a very complicated web of transactions. Not to be too cryptic about it, I’m supplying merchandise to one party in a dispute. The other party doesn’t want me to.” He paused. “Do you know how to reach Will?”

  “What does Will have to do with this,” I asked nervously.

  “I have reason to believe that Will’s in touch with the other side, the other party as it were. Or if he isn’t, he could be. I need to know if the blackmail’s coming from his friends. If it is, I’ll have to do what they want, or possibly he can help me negotiate. If it’s not coming from that quarter, then I’ll know who else has a stake in this and I’ll know what to do about it.”

  All this international intrigue, these sinister forces, sounded ludicrous to me. What seemed more likely was that Will might actually be behind this whole scheme—the opportunity to thwart one of his father’s arms deals, if that’s what we were talking about, being a perceived bonus on top of the destruction of his marriage. Certainly Will was resourceful enough to pull it off, and he’d threatened something like this many times over the years.

  “I’d have to know more about what I would be getting involved in, Cordell.” This was probably the first time I’d addressed him by that name. “Surely you understand that.”

  He considered this. “Right now all I’m asking for is that you help me find Will.”

  “As a friend of the family—that I could do.”

  “Thank you, Patrick.” He stood up and grasped my hand. Then he lifted a book out of the shelf; a panel of the library wall opened out to reveal a hidden staircase that led down to an elaborately equipped basement office. Within an hour I had tracked Will to a recording studio in Miami. I had to insist that it was a family emergency.

  “Who’s dead?” Will said, when he finally came to the phone.

  He listened while I brush-stroked the story, which sounded even more implausible in my telling. “Does this make any sense to you,” I asked.

  “Let’s say I’m familiar with the terrain.”

  “Can you do anything to help?”

  “Tell him to call me,” he said. “I want to hear it from His Royal Selfness.”

&nb
sp; I delivered this message, lightly edited, to Cordell, who was waiting upstairs in the library.

  Ten minutes later he returned, handing me an envelope. “I’m deeply grateful to you, Patrick,” he said, his demeanor that of a man who had received the last rites of his church and was ready to accept his fate.

  “You talked to him?”

  He nodded. “He’s coming in tomorrow morning.”

  He walked me to the hallway. I felt for some reason that I might never see him again, and the thought emboldened me even as it made me sad. “May I ask you a question?”

  He shrugged. “I’m in your debt.”

  “I heard a rumor—” I began.

  “That I killed my father.”

  “Well, yes,” I said.

  “And you want me to tell you whether it’s true? Well, I’ll tell you if you want. But why should you believe me?”

  “At this moment, I think I would.”

  “My father lost his money and his self-esteem with it, and he turned into a drunk. He used to beat my mother, and one day he came after me. And that was the day she picked up the shotgun. She didn’t mean to kill him, I don’t think. I think she was as surprised as he was when it went off. But I’ll tell you what …”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the eye. “If she hadn’t, I would have. Does that answer your question?”

  I held his gaze. “I don’t know.”

  “Ah, you see?” He smiled, evidently delighted with my inability to fully trust him—as if it confirmed his view of human nature. Or perhaps he was merely pleased to preserve the mystery.

  We shook hands and said goodbye. His chauffeur took me to Claridge’s and I left early the next morning. The envelope contained a signed blank check.

  I had several years to wonder about the outcome of this father and-son reunion. In the meantime, when I spoke to Will, it was all business. Just when I thought he was down for the count, his business manager approached me about selling his second label, which turned out to be far more valuable than we imagined. Eventually it fetched over forty million, almost half of which Will immediately poured into a free clinic and hospital in the Mississippi Delta. Millions more went to the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees as well as less worthy causes—friends and hangers-on. He seemed to be trying to get rid of the money as fast as possible, and his accountant asked me to impress on him the wisdom of preserving his capital. But when I reached him at his office in Los Angeles, Will said of the money—“It’s not mine, Patrick.”