The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “Long time since we’ve been here together,” he said to his daughter. “You used to love the red pandas.”

  Ashley looked stricken at this reference to her recent childhood; Bethany and Amber giggled.

  “What about your homework? I trust you got it done this afternoon?”

  “Dads.”

  Her friends tactfully averted their eyes.

  “School’s just started. We don’t have any yet,” she said, looking away. The final humiliation, for both of them, being that he’d backed her into a lie.

  “Okay,” he said cheerfully. “You girls have fun. But I’m taking you home by ten.”

  His daughter rolled her eyes in farewell.

  He had been sitting at the table for twenty minutes when Sasha finally appeared with Casey Reynes, their eyes all glittery and bright. Casey, Amber’s mother, was one of Sasha’s druggy friends. Luke had somehow been under the impression that coke had largely disappeared from their circle a decade before, and was uncertain whether his wife’s indulgence was a recent revival of an old party habit or if he simply had failed to notice it all these years, as he apparently had failed to notice so many other things while he was so single-mindedly pursuing his career.

  Sasha took a chair at the other end of the table between Casey’s husband, a partner at Goldman Sachs, and an actor invited to punch up the mix, a young man who was obviously exciting Guillermo’s interest. Luke himself was seated between Trinnie Johnson and Guillermo’s date, Sloane Cafferty, a fierce young trader a few years out of Radcliffe, who was morbidly fascinated by his ronin status.

  “What do you do all day?” she asked as the waiters served the salad course.

  “I read,” he said. “Today, I went to the Whitney and looked at the Hoppers. And then I went to a class at the New School. Socratic Humanism.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “About? I suppose it’s about being human.”

  “Don’t you miss, you know, being in the game?”

  “Not really. To tell you the truth, by the end, I really hated my job.”

  “Guillermo says you would’ve been running the firm in two years if you’d stayed.”

  “Luke’s writing a book,” said Casey, jumping into the conversation. “You know, I really should introduce you to my friend Russell Calloway; he’s an editor at one of the big houses. Very intellectual. He’s married to my best friend, Corrine.”

  Yet again, Luke wished he’d never announced his intention to write. It sounded like such a dreadful clich, and the fact that he’d failed to accomplish anything in that direction made him feel increasingly fraudulent when the subject came up. True, Japanese cinema had been a passionate hobby for years, and he’d spent hundreds of hours watching videos of samurai movies and making notes, but the notion of actually writing something grew more remote with each passing month. Instead, he consulted reference books and sought out rare videos on the Internet. The secret ambition that had animated him in his twenties, the one he had not announced—to write a novel—seemed even more implausible. He was discovering that it was difficult to adjust to the solo formlessness and fluidity of his days after spending half a lifetime enslaved to the rhythms of the financial markets, engaged in the rigidly structured rituals of corporate enterprise. Today, besides going to the Whitney, he’d gone to the gym, read the Times and the Journal more or less cover to cover, spent an hour trading on-line and tinkering with his account, made an appointment to see his accountant downtown, watched The Rosie O’Donnell Show, browsed for an hour in the Madison Avenue Bookshop, had lunch at Serafina with a copy of the new Salman Rushdie novel, masturbated, taken a nap, gone to his philosophy class at the New School, seen Ashley, and walked the three blocks to his apartment to dress for this evening. Sometimes he was surprised how easy it was to fill a day and sometimes he was horrified.

  “What are your goals?” he asked Sloane, turning the question back on her. “Where do you want to be in twenty years?”

  “I don’t know, I guess I’d like to be running my own fund.”

  Looking into her eager eyes, Luke tried to remember when all of this had stopped making sense to him.

  Certainly that would have been the acceptable route, leaving the firm to run ten or fifteen billion by himself.

  Letting his attention drift across the table, he heard Web Reynes giving the actor the definition of a player. “Basically, to be a player, you need a hundred million,” he was saying. “I mean, that’s where it all gets kind of interesting.”

  The actor looked frightened, even as he nodded.

  Web caught Luke listening in on them.

  “Wouldn’t you say that’s pretty much true?”

  Luke shrugged. “I’m afraid I’m not in the club.”

  “There ought to be a word for it. I mean, millionaire’s become so meaningless—everybody’s a millionaire.”

  “How about centenaire,” Luke said. “The hundred-million club.”

  “Not bad,” Web said, smiling. “I took some Latin at Exeter.”

  The conversation was blessedly truncated by the speeches and awards portion of the evening. Who has done as much for this city. Needs no introduction. Cause dear to our hearts. Luke looked across the table at Sasha just as she exchanged a glance with Bernard Melman, who was seated at the table behind her.

  Over the course of dinner, Sasha repeatedly beckoned the waiter to fill her wineglass and huddled confidentially with the actor. At one point, she noticed Luke watching her and stuck out her tongue, then held out her glass for more chardonnay. Her laughter carried across the table as if she were determined to be the life of the party. He caught snatches of her conversation, her voice metallic and shrill. Isn’t it to die?

  When the band started playing, she rose from her seat. “I’m in the mood to dance,” she said, looking at Luke. “But my husband is looking at me censoriously. And he’s not much of a dancer anyway. Perhaps you’d take me for a spin,” she said to Guillermo, who replied that he would be delighted. Luke watched as they walked out to the open area of the pavilion.

  After listening to Sloane discourse about the euro, he looked up to see Melman cutting in on Guillermo with the air of a suitor supremely confident of his welcome. Guillermo retired with a chilly bow to the billionaire as Sasha took his hand and shook her hips to the band’s approximation of “All I Wanna Do.” Although he looked slightly ludicrous, Melman was, if anything, a little more confident than most of the other paunchy middle-aged men who’d been coaxed out onto the dance floor.

  Luke excused himself from the table and went off to look for Ashley, exchanging greetings with friends and acquaintances before finally spotting her at the so-called children’s table, taken aback to see her deep in conference with Anton Hohenlohe. All of the young men at the table were at least a decade older than Ashley and her friends, and Hohenlohe, a friend of Sasha’s, was closer in age to the mother than the daughter. To his admirers, he was a stylish boulevardier, a living link to a lost continental world of Ferraris, Cte d’Azur casinos, and polo. His great-grandfather had supposedly been closely associated with mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner’s patron. Depending on one’s point of view, New York society was increasingly meritocratic or just increasingly nouveau riche; but Hohenlohe was considered a representative of the venerable tradition of aristocratic leisure. He was ubiquitous in Paris and Palm Beach as well as New York, and rumors of sexual malfeasance seemed only to enhance his mystique.

  He’d turned up here after a sojourn in Hollywood, where he’d first come into his inheritance and set himself up as a producer. The motion-picture business had a tradition of hospitality toward rich young men who wished to share their wealth in exchange for sex with aspiring actresses. If the girl whose night with him ended in the emergency room of Cedars-Sinai with nearly toxic levels of Rohypnol and cocaine in her bloodstream and some very nasty bruises had been without connections, or if Hohenlohe himself had been more established in the community, the incident probably wou
ld have been hushed up or allowed to fade away, but under the circumstances, he decided that Los Angeles wasn’t truly glamorous.

  Luke was appalled that this was Sasha’s idea of suitable company for their daughter and her friends—she, after all, had set up the table, which Luke had paid for. He watched as Ashley threw back her head and laughed at some remark of Hohenlohe’s, her manner and gestures reminding him all too much of her mother—a resemblance that was sealed when she lifted a champagne flute and tilted it upright between her lips—afraid that if he went over to the table he might lose control of his temper and further alienate his lately surly daughter. It occurred to him he could solve two problems at a single stroke, interrupting Sasha’s dance with Melman in the name of urgent parental business. He would tell her that he was taking Ashley home immediately and, if possible, send her over to make this announcement to their daughter herself. He was counting on his righteous indignation and Sasha’s vestigial sense of guilt to work in his favor, but when he spotted her among the dancers, he began to wonder if guilt was a concept with which she was familiar.

  To the tune of “Bootylicious,” one of the season’s hits, Sasha was grinding her pelvis into Melman’s, her hands on his shoulders. Even more than her posture and the burlesque motions of her hips, it was the expression on her face, a kind of liquid abandon combined with an intense focus on the eyes of her partner, that made the scene so lurid to Luke, and, he realized, looking around, to a great many of the assembled guests. Any other couple might have engaged in a similar display without attracting quite so much notice, but the eminence of both parties guaranteed them an audience; it was as if a spotlight followed them, illuminating their every gesture, and casting giant shadows that magnified the pantomime of their desire.

  Without a context, the dance might have been innocent enough. But clearly, this was richly contextualized. It was in the eyes of the riveted tribe, the pity with which they regarded him, unable to keep from looking even as they wished at all costs to avoid his gaze… in the way he saw women whispering to their neighbors. The community knew how to interpret this performance because they had been prepared for something like it—a confirmation of the buzz and rumors. This, if nothing else, was what Luke learned tonight—that his suspicions, far from being paranoid, were pretty general throughout the 10021 zip code, where even the clueless husbands seemed to know.

  And it was not so much the suggestive rhythm of her hips as the fixity of her glassy gaze on her partner that seemed so damning. Luke could either put an end to this by cutting in on the dance or he could walk away and postpone the reckoning. But he couldn’t continue to stand here watching and being watched, so he retreated to the back of the tented area to compose himself. Leaning against the railing of the snow monkey enclosure, he regarded the sign attached to the fence.

  SEPARATE LIFESTYLES

  Male snow monkeys have larger canine teeth, a fuller mane of hair, and weigh 20 percent more than females. Females remain with the group in which they were born for life. Males leave when they reach sexual maturity and may join several different groups during their lifetime.

  There was no sign of these anthropomorphs, male or female, and Luke turned away with an urgent sense of finding his daughter, of saving her somehow.

  She was laughing at something Hohenlohe was whispering in her ear, and from a certain liquidity in her posture, Luke could tell she was drunk. He approached unobserved and put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up, the blurred giddiness of her expression coming into a wary focus at the sight of his face.

  “We’re going home,” he said.

  The expression she directed at him over her creamy shoulder was like some terrible composite of a petulant seven-year-old’s and her mother’s worldliest smirk. For all of his own indignation, he was shocked by the look of loathing—the glower of a drunken fourteen-year-old—deforming her beautiful face.

  “Let’s go,” he said, steeling himself and glaring at Hohenlohe.

  She turned away, took a swig from the champagne glass, and rose slowly to her feet, attempting to convey a sense of outraged dignity as she struggled to establish her balance. Hohenlohe, observing proper form, rose beside her, napkin in hand, while her friends averted their eyes and bowed their heads.

  “I assure you I was—”

  “We were just having a conversation,” Ashley said.

  “You can finish it when you’re eighteen,” Luke said.

  “It’s not like this is the first time I’ve had, like, a glash of sampagne.”

  “Aren’t we sophisticated? How many glashes have we had tonight?”

  Amber and Bethany giggled nervously.

  “Just because you’re having a lousy time,” she said.

  “We’ll finish this conversation at home,” Luke said, taking her hand and leading her away from the table.

  “I hate you,” she muttered once they’d passed out of earshot.

  At that moment, a seal rocketed out of the pool, glistening in the artificial light against the backdrop of the trees and, above them, the cream-colored pueblos of Fifth Avenue, splashing down sideways and sending a luminescent wave over the edge of the wall. The night air was perfectly balanced between the heat of summer and the cool of the approaching autumn as they walked out, alone together, among the partygoers. The women were beautiful in their gowns, or at least glamorous in their beautiful gowns, their escorts rich in this richest of all cities, and Luke had never felt less like one of them, reminded now of the figures he’d seen this summer in Pompeii and Herculaneum, frozen in their postures of feasting and revelry.

  5

  Evelyn’s gave every appearance of a dive—being so drab as to make some visitors nostalgic for a lost Greenwich Village. I thought this kind of place was extinct, you might say, if on a whim or in order to get out of the rain you had descended eight steps down from the sidewalk and pushed through the door, squeezing past the regulars slouched on the dull, pitted mahogany bar till you reached the dining room, which was the length of a subway car and slightly wider. At nine o’clock, half the tables would be divvied up between tourists and aging bohemians who remembered the proprietress as an Off-Broadway diva, and who in their time had been drawn here by the legend of the Abstract Expressionists and Beat poets who were said to have lurched about the premises for a season or two before settling on the Cedar Tavern. No photos or memorabilia commemorated this golden age; the walls were bare, except for a few land- and seascapes, possibly Italian, of the kind purchased on a forgotten holiday. The very name, for Corrine, conjured a lost era of half-remembered night crawls and predawn revelry, the riotous codas of book parties and gallery openings and movie premieres, the fuzzy preludes to a dozen youthful hangovers. Surprised as she’d been to get Jim’s phone call, and by the notion of a postmidnight script meeting, she was nearly as surprised by the venue. She never would have come out if Jim hadn’t insisted, if Russell hadn’t encouraged her. It was ridiculous really, although kind of a typical Hollywood power play, and if Corrine had had a higher opinion of herself, she might have suspected it was a come-on, but Cody pretty much had his pick of gorgeous young actresses, not to mention Corrine’s vixenish sister, who pointedly had not been invited to come along. Anyway, Russell had said what could it hurt and speculated that maybe it was less about the script and more about Jim needing some feminine comfort and counsel.

  By 1:30, the tourists and diners were long gone, replaced by the vampires, many of whom she imagined might well have remained in place since she’d last set foot in here seven or eight years ago—the restaurant people just getting off their shifts, the line chefs and managers, the musicians and the made guys and the character actors who specialized in playing made guys, along with the kinds of directors and writers who had not yet been to rehab or who were in between visits and wanted to get down, sometimes in the company of A-list actors, without fear of reading about it in the gossip columns the next day. All of them waiting for the Duke, a vaguely reptilian-looking fellow with
slicked-back silver hair. She couldn’t remember if Russell had discovered his service first, or maybe it was Washington, but the packets he dealt not so very discreetly had extended countless evenings well past natural, legal limits.

  Some of the gossip columnists were here, too, in an unofficial capacity—whatever happened at Evelyn’s was off-the-record; it was like one of those watering holes on the savanna, at which the zebras drank unmolested beside the lions. Evelyn would have banned anyone who molested a fellow drinker or committed any untoward behavior to print. Corrine remembered that Monday nights were always busy. The Evelyn’s crowd rested up over the weekend, Friday and Saturday being amateur nights. Evelyn herself—a big overflowing woman with chipmunk cheeks who was never seen to move from her spot—sat lumpishly at a table in the back with a few haggard-looking friends. Cody was sitting at her table, although there was no sign of Jim.

  He stood up and wobbled over. “Alone at last,” he said, kissing her cheek.

  “Where’s Jim?”

  “His leash got yanked. Shall we get a table?”

  She had a notion that she’d been set up, but then decided that if what he was looking for was sex, he would’ve summoned Hilary, or Nancy, or one of a tag team of adoring women he must surely have at his disposal. Besides, she was already here. “Why not?” she said.

  Choosing a table in the back room, he held out a seat for her and sat down beside her. She was aware of Erhardt’s reputation as a pussy hound; he’d been married twice, both times to actresses, although this hadn’t prevented him from engaging in more and less publicized affairs. So here they were, meeting at a dive after midnight, with Erhardt flagging down an entirely unnecessary drink.

  “I’ve always heard you two were the perfect couple. You and Russell. Ivy League prince and princess.”