The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  Standing in the doorway, observing her in the midst of her preparty regimen, he was reminded of Bismarck’s remark about law and sausages—feminine glamour was something you didn’t necessarily want to see being made. At one time, Sasha herself was strict as a bride on her wedding day about segregating their toilettes, banishing him from the bedroom in the days when she still did her own hair and makeup, but she’d long since ceased worrying about preserving that part of her mystique for him.

  She was one of those celebrated beauties—women for whom the drape of a garment and the shape of the eyebrow were subjects of advanced study, who submitted themselves not only to trainers, hairdressers, and stylists but even unto the scalpels of surgeons in pursuit of a feminine ideal that they, in turn, took their modest part in shaping after their pictures appeared in the party pages of Town & Country and W. She was, in one sense, a professional beauty. In fact, Luke was still proud of her on that purely superficial level, of making an entrance with Sasha on his arm.

  The hairstylist was aiming a huge blow-dryer at his wife’s skull, which was somewhat disconcertingly exposed and pink—memento mori—in the jet of hot air, while her colleague dabbed at Sasha’s eyes with a little brush. Finally, the stylist noticed Luke standing in the doorway and turned off the dryer.

  Opening her eyes, Sasha looked at him in the mirror. “Oh, Luke, there you are. Do you think I have too much shadow?”

  Her voice had shadows, husky and abraded by years of smoking—but all the more attractive for that. People were starting to say she sounded like her pal Betty Bacall. Even in this intermediate stage of preparation, she could provoke his desire, and at this moment he almost held that against her.

  “Depends. Are you trying to look mysterious or slutty?”

  “I thought so,” Sasha said. “Let’s lighten up on the shadow, Yvonne.”

  Although renowned for her fashion sense, courted by designers and doted on by their assistants, a perennial on the Best Dressed list—she would be sitting in the front rows once Fashion Week commenced in a matter of days—Sasha still trusted Luke’s judgment on matters of basic taste and proportion, perhaps an instinct left over from the days when she dressed and groomed for him alone, or at least most especially for him.

  “What are you wearing?” she asked as the hair dryer resumed its howl.

  “A strapless tulle gown from Dolce & Gabbana over a push-up bra.”

  “What?”

  “My tux.” This was practically tautological—the benefit was formal.

  “Duh. I mean which tux?”

  “The Anderson & Sheppard.”

  “Luke, you’ve been wearing that thing for ten years. It’s starting to shine.”

  “And I’m hoping to wear it another ten.”

  “Not to mention that it hangs on you.” She turned to the girls. “Luke’s lost fifteen pounds since he quit his job, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the only good thing that’s come out of this whole finding-yourself kick, losing that business-lunch paunch, though I’m starting to suspect he must be having a fling. Darling,” she said, “can’t you wear the Ozwald Boateng I bought you in London?”

  “When I’m younger.”

  The garment in question was cut like a cigar tube and made him look like an Oscar nominee advised by an overzealous team of stylists.

  “Now that he’s unemployed,” Sasha said to the girls, “Luke’s working on his sense of humor.”

  He sat down on the bed and sank slowly into the fluffy depths of the duvet. “And what will you be showing to stunning advantage?”

  “Don’t worry. Oscar lent me a gown from the showroom.”

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “Well, I’m just telling you what a thrifty little hausfrau you have.”

  He took some comfort in the verb, with its imputation of possession.

  “It’s beyond,” Sasha said.

  “Just wait till you see it,” Clarice said.

  “It’s to die,” the other one said.

  “Totally to die.”

  The blow-dryer started up again.

  He looked around as if to reacquaint himself with the room. While the public rooms were austerely neoclassical, in the style that had become fashionable in their little corner of the world in the nineties, the bedroom was a pastel nest, the inner chamber of a queen bee, all padded and layered in patterned and quilted fabrics from Fortuny, Scalamandre, and Brunschwig.

  “Can you think of any reason,” he asked once the blow-dryer stopped, “why anyone would be following me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I keep seeing the same black Suburban everywhere I go.”

  “He’s also working on his paranoia,” Sasha announced to her groomers, “now that he has all this time on his hands.” She turned to Luke: “Maybe you should be writing a thriller instead of some book about samurai movies.” Back to the girls: “He spent a year in Tokyo when he was working for Morgan and bought into the whole Bushido thing. Of course, all the investment bankers like to think of themselves as Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo, fearlessly slicing down the competition. That whole Art of War thing. He’s rented a little studio over on Seventy-sixth to write, but I think he’s probably using it to entertain exotic women. Or maybe to look at Internet porn.”

  “Just trying to stay out of your way, dearest,” Luke said.

  She wasn’t actually worried about him straying; only about his self-imposed sabbatical. Although he’d determined six months ago that they would be able to maintain their current opulent manner of living for some years to come, even if he failed to resume working, she was alarmed at the prospect of a declining standard of living, or even a static one. Were it up to her, Sasha would have been perfectly willing to trade back the fifteen pounds he’d lost for the seven-figure income without a second thought, and, in fact, the market slide of the past spring had suddenly seemed to bear out her fears. As yet, he hadn’t confided the extent of their losses, but he was the principal investor in an independent film-production company that was, he suspected, on the verge of collapse after an overambitious expansion into broadband, which he himself, as their former investment banker, had encouraged back in the days when they were shoveling money at every twenty-five-year-old with a laptop and a business plan.

  Whatever her concerns about her monthly allowance, Sasha seemed slightly embarrassed at having a husband whose place in the community was no longer clearly defined. He thought of himself as a ronin, a samurai without a master, and somehow he imagined she would share his excitement about this freedom, that she might find it romantic, even sexy, to have a husband who wasn’t just another suit.

  As part of his program of exploration and personal improvement, he’d planned to spend the summer traveling through Europe with his family, but Sasha had been loath to miss out on the social season in Southampton, as had their daughter, who seemed to believe that an hour spent without her friends was a hideous waste; in the end, they’d settled for two unhappy weeks in Italy.

  “They have a term for guys like Luke,” Sasha announced. “Men who cash out their winnings early and leave the table. There’re dozens of them around town. Walking ghosts. That’s what they call them. Isn’t that good?”

  “Hell, I wish I could retire,” said Clarice, pointing her blow-dryer at the ceiling. “I mean, isn’t that like everybody’s dream?”

  “Luke, I think we’ve found your next wife.”

  To her credit, Clarice blushed.

  “What’s this about Ashley going to the benefit?” He would have preferred to have this conference in private, but his irritation drove him forward. “I really wish you’d consulted me about this. I can’t see why she needs to attend these kinds of events at her age. Especially on a school night.”

  “We had an extra table and I thought it would be nice for her to host her friends. Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud.”

  “She’s thirteen years old, Sasha.”

  “Fourteen. I seem to recall you mop
ing around at the birthday party last month.”

  “And if you’d had your way, it would have been her Sweet Sixteen. Isn’t she precocious enough, for Christ’s sake?”

  “What’s the harm? It’s important to socialize her.”

  “Prepare her for a life of charity balls?”

  “She’ll be with her friends. She’s going directly to Bethany’s house and changing there, so we’ll meet her at the zoo.”

  “Just because Bethany’s mother lets her dress like a slut and hang out till dawn.”

  Luke had finally realized how seriously his wife’s ambitions for their daughter diverged from his own three years ago when he’d picked up the Sunday Times magazine one morning and discovered a full color picture of her standing in front of their building in a Gucci trench coat, under the headline YOUNG FASHION PLATES OF MANHATTAN. He should have made a stand then. Or somewhere along the way. Instead, he had allowed it to happen while he spent most of his waking hours making a career that bankrolled a style of living that he did not, he suddenly realized, find amusing.

  The other reason he was upset about Ashley’s presence at the benefit was that this “extra table” would have cost at least ten grand.

  After changing into the tux, he drifted out to the rarely used double-height living room—which seemed to be holding its breath, as if awaiting a crew from Architectural Digest or House & Garden to set up and shoot it—checking out what appeared to be a new Christian Liagre daybed he was almost certain he hadn’t seen before, then remembered Sasha threatening to update the decor with some contemporary pieces if they couldn’t redecorate this year. “The whole Biedermeier neoclassical look is so mid-nineties,” she’d concluded. For that matter, he wondered if he recognized the carpet—was it the same Tabriz or Shiraz he’d been walking on for years, or had it been replaced recently? For some reason, it looked different.

  The light was going fast, the days getting shorter, although the heat of summer lingered in the air outside. From the window, Luke looked out over the water towers of Fifth Avenue to the park, studying the senescence of the daylight, which seemed almost viscous, ready to coagulate—trying to register that perfect moment of transition from day to evening, that instant when the light, in dying, was most nearly itself.

  It was the hour of anticipation and preparation, the still pivot between the activities of the day and the promises of the night. He felt as if he was waiting for something to happen. Something miraculous. Something other than the gala beginning of another officially sanctioned autumn season. Wasn’t that the promise of the city—that anything could happen—the possibility of riot and reinvention? Or had it been revoked somewhere along the way… while he was in the Hamptons this summer, when he was still working downtown and wouldn’t have noticed? When he’d turned forty?

  Finally, Sasha stood framed in the doorway, vibrating, it seemed to him, with the knowledge of her own creamy beauty, her hair a golden helmet, wearing something that looked like a rippling golden sheet secured over one shoulder. Diana the huntress.

  Jesus, he thought. She looks edible.

  “So? Isn’t the dress beyond?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Isn’t it to die?”

  “Well,” he said, having never quite gotten used to this figure of her speech, though he heard it a dozen times a day. He pulled her toward him and raised his hand to stroke her forehead.

  “Luke,” she said, squirming out of his grasp. “My hair.”

  The elevator doors opened on Luke’s floor, revealing a tuxedoed Tupper Carlson, ruler of a downtown brokerage house and the president of the co-op, descending from the penthouse with his great blue heron of a wife, notable for her stick legs and prominent beak. (Five years ago, with his application pending before the co-op committee, Luke had given five thousand to the Audubon Society, on whose board she aptly sat.) Her pencil-thin, sinewy arms and knotted hands were at odds with her taut glazed-porcelain face. Sixty-year-old arms and hands, forty-year-old face. Dr. Baker her Praxiteles, as Sasha had once remarked.

  “What a lovely dress,” Sasha said.

  “Oh, this? I found it in the closet. I can’t even remember where I bought it.”

  “It’s beyond,” Luke said, smiling stupidly.

  This regal couple always conveyed a certain irritation when forced to share the elevator, having largely insulated themselves from unexpected infusions of humanity with their chauffeur-driven cars, private jets, and private clubs. As board president, Carlson had been responsible for replacing the elevator man with a control console and video system at the door, which allowed the doormen to regulate the destination of the elevator—presumably to spare Carlson the discomfort of sharing the cramped conveyance with a representative of the lower orders, although he’d justified the change in economic terms. It was also Carlson who, in order to prevent the lesser rich from infesting the building, had raised the cash-purchase requirement from 75 to 100 percent, and the net-worth requirement from double to triple the purchase price of the apartment, although Luke had circumvented these mandates by borrowing half a million from his firm and then, after his application was approved, repaying it by taking out a secret mortgage. Everybody did it, of course, except for those like Carlson, who were so rich that they sneered at the tax deduction.

  It seemed to Luke at this moment, as they silently descended, that Tupper’s demeanor was even more citric than usual, as if he knew about some of Luke’s recent market losses, which wasn’t impossible, given his position in the financial community; the only thing more distasteful than a man of declining means to someone of his caste and temperament was such a man who held shares in one’s co-op.

  “After you,” Luke said when the doors finally opened.

  Fifth Avenue was clogged with limos and Town Cars, but after ten minutes they had nearly reached the entrance, where blue police barriers funneled them between the scrum of paparazzi and curious civilians into the Central Park Zoo. As their driver tried to ease over toward the curb, he was cut off by a black Mercedes, followed closely by a black Suburban.

  “There it is again,” Luke said.

  “There what is?”

  “The black Suburban.”

  “For God’s sake, Luke.”

  “And if I’m not mistaken, that’s Melman’s Mercedes,” he said. “The way I hear it, his thugs are completely out of control. A cab sideswiped one of his cars the other night and they opened fire right there on Seventy-third Street. He had to make some calls and spread some cash around to keep that out of the papers.”

  “I don’t know what you’re babbling about.”

  The two cars inched forward ahead of them. Three hulks in suits jumped out of the Suburban while it was still moving. The two cars docked in front of the entrance. A fourth bodyguard leapt from the front seat of the Mercedes, conferred with the others and reconnoitered the crowd, then finally walked back to the car and tapped gently before opening the rear door.

  From his window, Luke glimpsed Bernard Melman and his escort—not the wife but the daughter, Caroline, from his first marriage. Melman, a head shorter, was intermittently visible, or at least the skunklike white stripe of his pate was. Luke glanced over at his wife, who was checking herself out in the mirror of her compact, apparently unaware of Melman, who was rumored to be on the brink of a divorce, his wife having taken up residence in their Palm Beach house.

  Finally, their car nosed up to the entrance. Sasha tugged Luke’s bow tie down at the corners, imparting a less rigid, more insouciant look. He jumped out of the car and held the door open for Sasha, who elicited a hue and cry from the photographers. Sasha took Luke’s arm and marched forward, amid calls of “Sasha, over here.” “Smile, Sasha.” “Who are you wearing?”

  Luke let Sasha set the pace as she paused in front of her favorite photographers, letting her step out ahead, and admiring her himself: a figurehead braving the dark waves of paparazzi surging and yearning on either side of her, illuminated by flashes of lightning.r />
  “Come on, Luke, give us a smile.”

  Amazing, he thought, trying to summon a semblance of a smile, that one of them remembered the name of Sasha’s husband. The benefit circuit was the realm of wives; husbands were merely the bankers, black-and-white shadows of their brilliantly plumed mates.

  “Just one by yourself, Sasha.”

  Luke stepped away. Sasha rolled her eyes and pursed her lips apologetically, as if to say, What a bother. But she obliged the photographers’ every request.

  “One more. This way.”

  “That’s the third great lie,” Sasha said when she rejoined Luke. “When a photographer says ‘Just one more.’”

  “Only if you’re a beautiful woman.”

  “Well,” she said, rewarding him with a smile all his own. “Around here, the competition is mostly geriatric.”

  Finally, they were past the gauntlet and sheltered by a tented tunnel that emerged into the courtyard of the zoo. Luke announced himself to one of the young women with clipboards who flanked the inner entrance—all of them in black, alert, ready at a moment’s notice to be either slavish or slightly imperious, as the situation demanded. She repeated his name interrogatively, as if testing its validity.

  “Here are your place cards, Mr. and Mrs. McGavock,” a second young woman said, then whispered something to the first.

  “Get me a drink, darling,” Sasha said. “I’m going to say hi to the girls.” She gestured toward a group over near the seal pool.