The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  In what seemed like one of those moments of semipsychic marital communion, Russell said, “I think Jim said he’d sent him a copy of your screenplay.”

  “That would be—he’d be great,” Corrine said. Not that she was about to bring it up at dinner… not unless he did. She had a horror of appearing pushy or mercenary, a legacy she blamed on her WASPy New England heritage—a worldview in which business and pleasure were strictly segregated. She knew that this was a quaint notion and thoroughly contradicted the very essence of social life in Manhattan.

  These dinner parties were always preceded by Sturm und Drang—Corrine almost wondered if it was worth it. Tonight’s suspense had begun to build when Washington had called to say that his wife, Veronica, was sick. So Russell had invited Carlo, who, besides being a chef, a fact that could only increase the level of angst and adrenaline, belonged to that class of gregarious New Yorkers with phantom spouses. “Married singles,” Corrine called them.

  “Since we know Carlo won’t bring his wife, why not invite Martha Stewart,” Corrine said, “and really make yourself fucking crazy?”

  “Carlo will love Hilary,” Russell said. “Hard to say which of them is more likely to start groping the other. Actually, she seems fairly sane and balanced for a change. Plus, she’s keeping an eye on the kids. And you should’ve seen how happy they were to see her.”

  “She hasn’t even spoken to them in three months.”

  He paused in his chopping and looked up. “A little testiness there?”

  “Just an observation.” The subject of her sister was fraught with… well, with being fraught.

  “Maybe she’s sensed some, I don’t know, ambivalence on your part.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just… I think we’re all still trying to figure out the dynamics of this particular extended family.”

  She watched his hands, wincing at each stroke of the glistening blade. Russell was such a klutz; he shouldn’t be allowed to wield this ruthless German cutlery—witness the scars from his culinary adventures. “Are you saying I’m insecure?”

  Russell put down the knife and embraced her, holding his wet hands away from her back. “Actually, it’s the typical family drama. You love your little sister, but she happens to drive you insane.”

  Corrine allowed herself to be mollified, even as she tried to remember the last time Russell had hugged her. She should mark it down on her calendar, along with her increasingly infrequent periods.

  “Do we have any thyme?”

  She checked her watch. “Almost seven-thirty.”

  “Not time,” he said. “Thyme.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “The herb? Thyme?”

  She glared at him. God, she hated how tense and snippy he got before a dinner party. Why did he bother? Why not just order in Chinese like normal people or expense-account something preprepared from Dean and DeLuca?

  “How the…” She lowered her voice. “How would I know? Thyme—I’m not even sure what the hell it is. The kitchen’s your domain. Gourmet cooking is part of your recipe for the good life, not mine. And don’t blame me because you invited your chef friend and now you’re all wigged-out.”

  Thyme? The only thing she knew about thyme was that it was part of the title of that Simon and Garfunkel song.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “In other words, you’re not asking me a question. You’re telling me that we don’t have any thyme and hoping I might fetch you some.”

  “Do you think you could pop around the corner?”

  Corrine sighed. She supposed this might be preferable to witnessing the escalating panic of the home chef, but she wanted to explore the subject of Hilary a little further.

  Actually, no, she didn’t. “So who’s coming, exactly?”

  “Carlo—”

  “I still don’t understand why you invited him. Unless you can only entertain under pressure.”

  “Carlo doesn’t expect a four-star meal. He’s just grateful to be invited to someone’s home. Everyone else is too scared to cook for him.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re so relaxed.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Who else?”

  “Nancy Tanner—”

  “I like Nancy.” Nancy was the perennial single girl of their set. Five years ago, Russell had published her first novel, a story about a perennial single girl, and it had become a surprise best-seller. Corrine had become nostalgic for the days when Nancy’s anecdotes about disastrous dates had seemed less like material she was trying out for her next book or talk-show appearance, but she always said, when called upon to defend her, that she’d earned it. Scrapping for years, jammed into a walk-up studio in Yorkville, blue-penciling articles about acne and dating and diets for young women’s magazines as her twenties turned into her thirties, surviving on canaps and cigarettes, intermittently investing her hopes in some wildly inappropriate suitor. Even lying about her age, which had become a gossip-column tempest—who could blame her? Women like Casey hated Nancy because she was pretty and thin and refused to play by their rules and because they assumed she must be after their husbands. Finding her own life increasingly circumscribed by the rituals of middle age and motherhood, Corrine liked knowing somebody who was still running around drinking too much and screwing strange men. Some of them might be married, but Nancy never poached on her friends. And she could always be counted on to say or do something embarrassing at the dinner table—nearly a lost art here at the beginning of the new century—particularly since Washington Lee had quit drinking. A few months ago, at their last dinner party, she’d told Paul Auster that he ought to read John Grisham “to bone up on plotting.”

  Actually, Nancy was a lot like Corrine’s little sister, except that Hilary hadn’t yet written the book, or made the transition to act two—still the party girl at the age of thirty-whatever: the girlfriend, the traveling companion, the bit-part actress with the movie-star social life. If Corrine wasn’t mistaken, Hilary would be thirty-five on her next birthday—the scariest one for single urban women, what Nancy had called in a recent article “the female equivalent of the two-minute warning in football.” Time left, but not all that much. Bio clock ticking away.

  “And of course the birthday boy and his dragoness—Jim and Judy. And Washington, and now your sister.”

  “Don’t seat those two together—Washington and Hilary, I mean. They’d probably go at it right under the table.”

  “Where’s the phone?” Russell asked, his head whipping around the wreckage of the kitchen. “I’ve got to ask Carlo about the meat.” Sometimes she wondered how he didn’t hurt his neck jerking his head around like some demented robin frantic for worms.

  “What are you cooking?”

  “Poitrine de veau farcie.”

  “Sometimes you can be such a fag. What’s that in American?”

  “Stuffed veal breast. It’s kind of a retro dish.”

  “Sounds a little heavy. It’s, like, seventy degrees outside.”

  “Hey, summer’s over.”

  “Then why are you wearing a polo shirt?”

  When Corrine stuck her head in the bathroom, Hilary was in the tub with the kids. She opened her mouth but found herself speechless, unable to think of an appropriate response. If her talk with Russell had made her self-conscious about her feelings for her sister, she nonetheless had a sudden terrifying premonition that Hilary had come to take her children away from her, and she wanted, needed, right now, to lift Jeremy up out of the tub, away from his… aunt was the word that had formed in her mind. But, of course, Hilary was more than his aunt—and that was the crux of the problem.

  She tried to narrow her indignation to focus on the inappropriateness of Hilary’s body, which wasn’t the body of an aunt or a mother, but that of a starlet, of a fantasy object in a magazine. Would it be any less inappropriate if her six-year-old son were in the tub with a figure more boyish? Jere
my, however, seemed oblivious, his back to his naked aunt’s tits, holding a Pokmon figure in each hand. And what about Russell, who might at any moment walk in to check on things? Things. That was what they were—she was seeing through Russell’s eyes now—like objects with a separate existence from the owner’s. She felt she had some sudden insight into the male psyche—the objectifying power of their lust.

  She tried to remember the last time she’d seen her sister naked. Were her breasts always so pronounced? So there? She caught herself looking for scars. Living in L.A. all these years, of course she must’ve had them done. Something Hilary was likely to do anyway. As if she could read her sister’s mind, Hilary began to soap her breasts and looked up at Corrine, innocent and unself-conscious, or provocative.

  “I thought I’d better clean myself up for your company.”

  Will they be treated to a glimpse of your breasts? Corrine wondered.

  Storey, who’d been humming, broke into a warbling song:

  When you say good-bye

  It doesn’t mean you’ll die

  So don’t cry

  When you say good-bye

  “That’s a nice song,” Corrine said.

  “I just invented it.”

  Where did she come up with this stuff?

  “This is Pikachu,” said Jeremy, holding up a Pokmon, an obsession that had killed off the dinosaurs.

  “How do you do, Pikachu?”

  “Mom,” Storey said. “Aunt Hilary knows the Backstreet Boys.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Corrine said. “I’m sure she does.”

  Corrine was dressing when Russell, wearing his Chez Panisse apron, barged in to announce the arrival of Washington Lee.

  After all these years, she still thought of Russell’s entrances as being abrupt, almost slapstick. Crash Calloway. She usually found this endearing, though, Russell’s physical lurchiness offsetting some of his more effete pretensions. She looked at her watch. “Remember when Washington always arrived two hours late?”

  “That was before he stopped drinking. Now he wants to eat at six-thirty and be home by ten.”

  It was kind of sad, the extinction of that bright genie that came out after Washington had had a few. Corrine didn’t particularly go for black guys as a rule, but the glimmer in his eye was when he was hitting his stride, the naughty confidences he drew you into, the outrageous and obscene comments always delivered with dry aplomb, his way of playing on your fear of being an uncool white person but then letting you off the hook at the last minute, allowing you to laugh with him at them.… She missed the bad old Washington, the one who wobbled to his feet as the dessert was served to quote swatches of poetry in a variety of languages before screwing one of the guests in the bathroom. It was all highly amusing, until the moment it became merely sloppy, a moment that came earlier and earlier in the evening as time went by and which became less and less charming after he married Veronica and they had a baby. Then he’d finally stopped, cold turkey, and while he was a less unpredictable element, she missed that spark, the demonic gleam…. The lights grew dimmer as they hit their forties and some of the lights had been extinguished altogether.

  Russell pulled off the apron and rummaged in his closet. “Any idea how long Hilary’s staying?”

  “Haven’t had a chance to ask.” She glanced over at him. “You don’t really mind, do you? God knows we owe her.”

  “I like Hilary,” Russell said. “I’m crazy about Hilary.” He held up one of his stripy English dress shirts. “What do you think? With a blazer and jeans.”

  “Very Upper East Side at home for the evening,” Corrine said, smiling at the pride Russell took in his slightly fuddy-duddy, contrarian form of dress, particularly since they’d moved downtown. He was one of the few humans south of Fourteenth Street who didn’t own a pair of black jeans.

  “Maybe she can do some baby-sitting,” he said. “I mean, not that I think of her as a natural in that department. On the other hand—”

  “Let’s not get into the other hand,” said Corrine, nodding to indicate Jeremy, who was suddenly in the door.

  “Hey, Dad,” he said. “What’s faster—a Ferrari or a Porsche?”

  “It depends,” Russell said.

  “Jimmy Clifton’s dad has a Ferrari, but Asher Gold’s dad has a Porsche.”

  “Ferrari,” Russell said.

  “I thought so. Thanks, Dad.”

  This was one of the perils of raising kids in New York, she thought, at least if you were trying to subsist on less than two hundred and fifty grand a year. Ferraris and Porsches. When they had first moved to TriBeCa, it was a frontier village populated by artists, musicians, and families that couldn’t afford space uptown and didn’t mind traveling ten blocks for groceries, but in the last few years it had been overrun by Wall Streeters and celebrities and Kennedy princes. If they’d owned their loft, they at least would have profited from the gentrification, but by renting, they had missed out on the boom. Although their rent was for the moment stabilized, they lived in fear of paying market price for the space. She’d tried to persuade Russell to look at houses in Brooklyn or even Pelham, a not-too-distant refuge of the middle-aged culturati that had some unrestored houses and decent public schools, but he was determined to make his stand in Manhattan, claiming he was too old for Brooklyn and too young for Pelham—a typical Russell observation.

  “How do I look?” Corrine smoothed her hair back and faced him.

  “Great,” he answered without looking.

  “How would you know?”

  He turned away from the mirror, where he was fixing his collar. “That dress isn’t my favorite.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Too stretchy across the top. It makes you look flat.”

  “I am flat.” She pictured Hilary’s breasts, their volume and thrust.

  “No you’re not.” He seemed to take this personally, as if she were devaluing marital property. For her part, Corrine was quite happy with her endowment and secretly believed that cup size had an inverse ratio to IQ. “Well, thirty-four barely B doesn’t exactly count as stacked.”

  “You asked my opinion, my love.”

  “Go see if Storey’s in her pj’s yet. Since I’ve got to change.”

  While she didn’t necessarily share Russell’s opinion on the dress, she now felt self-conscious—a bad way to start out an evening. Suddenly, it was all about tits.

  “Hey, Mom,” Jeremy said. “Can humans transform themselves?”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “I mean, can they change into other things?”

  Puzzled, she finally looked away from the vanity and saw he was playing with one of those Transformer robots that can be converted into trucks and tanks and planes. “That’s a very good question, honey.”

  “Well, can they?”

  “Better ask your father.”

  2

  Everywhere he looked, there was a black Suburban with smoked windows, idling curbside or double-parked, like a crocodile lurking beside a riverbank. Yesterday, this same vehicle, or one identical to it, had been standing outside his gym, but when Luke approached, it had disappeared into the current of uptown traffic before he’d thought to take down the license number. Though he hadn’t noticed anything when he flagged a cab outside the New School, the black hulk had been behind him since they’d come up from the underpass in front of Grand Central, trailing him up Park, making the turn onto Eightieth and then onto Lexington, passing slowly as his cab pulled to the curb outside the apartment building where his daughter was meeting her psychiatrist.

  When, a few minutes later, he confided his suspicions to Ashley, who was surprised, if not necessarily thrilled, to see him standing on the sidewalk, she rolled her eyes with that exasperation that she seemed to reserve for her credulous father.

  “Do you know how many black Suburbans there are in the city? Half the girls in school get picked up in them.”

  She was right, of course. In
the last decade, they’d become as ubiquitous as Lincoln Town Cars, the hypertrophied stealth vehicle of urban wealth.

  “You realize I’ve got study group at Bethany’s house in a few minutes?” she added impatiently.

  “Actually, I thought maybe you could blow her off and we’d go to Starbucks or something.”

  She seemed to weigh this option for a moment. “It’s our first one. After the summer and all.”

  “Well, then, I’ll walk you over,” he said, trying to hide his disappointment.

  “I think Mom may be right,” she said as they headed west on Eightieth. “You’ve got too much time on your hands.”

  This remark he chose to ignore. “How was school?”

  “Okay.”

  “You happy with your teachers?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So you think I gave enough money to the capital fund last year?” He still couldn’t get over the fact that one of the mothers had informed Sasha, over lunch last year, that in order to get the best teachers, a girl’s parents were expected to give at least ten thousand on top of the tuition, which was almost thirty. Or that in the end he’d caved in. On the Upper East Side, charity tended to entail this kind of cost-benefit analysis.

  “I guess.”

  As they walked toward Fifth, the conversation limped along in this fashion—like a pedestrian with a stunted leg.

  He left her at the door of the limestone Beaux Arts town house. “Your mom and I are going out tonight.”

  “I know,” she said, turning in the doorway. “To the benefit at the zoo. Didn’t Mom tell you I’m going, too? She had an extra table, so I invited some friends.”

  Letting himself into his apartment, Luke sought out his wife, who was being groomed by her hair and makeup team, and stood outside the master bedroom, reluctant to enter this buzzing, fragrant enclave. In recent years, he’d felt less and less at home in their bedroom anyway, and spent less and less time there. His alleged snoring, his midlife, middle-of-the-night, enlarged prostate–induced trips to the bathroom, the differences in their schedules—all of this added up to many nights on the daybed in the library. When he left his job, he had imagined that this would change, that the sexual fervor of their early years—or at least the companionability of their middle period—might be revived; but if anything, he spent fewer nights in the marital bed than when he was still working, and sex was strictly by appointment. Unfortunately, he still wanted her. To be relieved of that specific desire might be a blessing, as apparently it had been for other long-married husbands of his acquaintance.