The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “Next thing I know, I’m lying on my face in the blackness. I can’t breathe and I can’t see, and my entire body is aching from the inside out. I don’t know if I’m blinded or there’s just no light, but finally I make out a yellow glow in the distance and I start crawling toward it. Then some people pulled me into the lobby of a building.”

  “Did you reach your friend?”

  “After the second tower came down, I went back. Because I thought he might be in there in that monstrous pile and it was my fault. I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I just stood there on the edge and then, I don’t know, I got in a line, behind another guy. I just took my place, passing along pieces of the debris. Someone gave me a hard hat.” He paused and examined the cut on his arm. “Once in a while, I stopped working to make a call. Then my phone went dead.”

  “Phone service is completely screwed up,” Corrine said. “You shouldn’t assume—”

  “This morning, there were volunteers down there with phones. I couldn’t reach him.” He shrugged. “Mailbox full.” He shook his head. “A hundred-something floors up. If my daughter hadn’t gotten drunk, if my wife hadn’t been… If I hadn’t fought with the both of them. Windows on the World at eight.”

  “Have you talked with them? Does your family know you’re safe?”

  He nodded, directing a disconcertingly intense gaze upon her. Not the look of a lecher, more the unself-conscious stare of a child. “You look familiar,” he said.

  “Corrine,” she said, holding out her hand.

  “Luke,” he said, taking her hand as he glanced back over his shoulder. “Is this really happening?”

  “I think so,” she said. “It’s all kind of unbelievable, though.”

  “I keep wondering if I ever actually regained consciousness.”

  She held his rough hand and kneaded it cautiously.

  “You made it,” she said.

  “I know what it is,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You look like Katharine Hepburn.”

  “What, spinsterish and flinty?”

  “In a good way.”

  “You’re delirious.” Actually, she recalled Russell saying the same thing. Centuries ago. “Do you want to wash up? We’re right up the street. I just came out to check on a neighbor.”

  He shook his head. “I should get home.”

  “You’ll have to walk up to Fourteenth. Everything’s blocked off below that. And even then… I don’t know if there are any cabs.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Please,” she said, feeling embarrassed in the grip of his gaze. “For what? I didn’t do anything. Not compared to what you’ve been doing….”

  “Actually, you did,” he said.

  Corrine jotted her name and her cell phone number on the back of a receipt from Odeon. “Do me a favor,” she said, her voice breaking. “Will you just let me know… well, that you made it home safely. Would you do that for me, please?”

  It was in many respects a typical encounter on the day after, one of thousands between stunned and needy strangers, the kind of thing she might have recalled months or years later when something reminded her of that time or someone asked her where she’d been that day.

  7

  To Luke, it seemed nothing short of miraculous that you could still pick up the phone and conjure up moo shu pork, shrimp toast, and fried dumplings, that men from Shaolin and Shanghai were fanning out on mountain bikes through the streets and avenues above Canal, bearing the sacraments of a New York Sunday night in plastic bags slung over their handlebars. This much of the metropolitan idea, at least, was intact. Smoking a cigarette under the awning of his building as the doormen politely ignored him, he counted five of them racing their bicycles across Seventy-seventh Street, ministering to the shaken populace at the end of this apocalyptic week.

  Under the pretext of buying the foreign papers, Luke had come outside to smoke. After all these years of berating Sasha for her smoking, he was stubbornly unwilling to admit he’d picked up the habit on the breaks between digging.

  He followed one of the deliverymen into the building and exchanged a fifty-dollar bill for his family’s traditional Sunday meal from Pig Heaven, carrying the bags up in the elevator and setting up in the kitchen, calling Sasha and Ashley from their separate corners of the apartment even as he found his thoughts tending downtown. With his body clock so out of whack, downtown in flames, the schedule of office life now a receding memory, Luke didn’t think he would notice Sunday as such, didn’t think he would feel the usual suck of low-grade depression. Hard to believe that the rhythms of the week could be so internalized that this particular Sunday would register as anything except the fifth day of an entirely new calendar. Perhaps the muted feeling of letdown had as much to do with the sense of receding crisis, as when, a few days after the funeral of a loved one, the narcotic of shock wears off and the sense of surviving from moment to moment gives way to the realization that you will simply have to carry on with the routines of daily life as if nothing had happened.

  He knew he was lucky to be alive—but he felt distinctly unworthy of this gift. These last few days, instead of light and blessed and spared, he’d been feeling borne down by the burden of it as the roll call of the noble, hapless victims unscrolled on television and in the papers. He’d been scared shitless most of the hours he’d spent downtown and haunted by nightmares ever since, but he felt so utterly useless up here on Seventy-seventh Street that he now wished he’d stayed. As if he belonged somewhere, even inside that toxic cloud, behind the blue police barriers—a feeling he hadn’t had in a long time, since he’d become bored with his job and disaffected with his life.

  “Pig Heaven!” he called to his family.

  As the son of a minister, Luke had been required to go to church until, at the age of fourteen, he’d fled north to prep school, and if for a few years he’d been sinfully proud to listen to his father intoning the service, leading the songs, and instructing their neighbors in the paths of righteousness, that pleasure had been supplanted in later years by a vague embarrassment and increasingly by a profound desire that his father’s profession might be carried on out of sight of his friends—in an office or a factory, say—especially when he started addressing the issue of civil rights from the pulpit, thereby alienating a portion of his flock.

  “Ladies? Dinner!”

  Being the minister’s son had complicated his own participation in the required delinquencies of adolescence. Luke was gifted enough to skip sixth grade, with socially disastrous results; for several years, he found it difficult to insinuate himself into the pack of older boys with their facial and pubic hair, and his attempts to do so tended to be awkward and ill-judged, often resulting in detention, without permanently changing his outsider status. He came to dread the Monday-morning return to school, which inevitably tainted the pleasures of the preceding day, as well. For years, the ticking clock of 60 Minutes, which he watched every Sunday night with his parents, seemed to him to signify the end of his brief weekend respite from careless hazing and academic boredom. This vague looming dread persisted long after he’d become a track star and a member of the group that smoked cigarettes down by the river, and was reinforced in his early years on Wall Street when the Sunday-night clock ticked, ticked, ticked toward an eighty-hour week of Hobbesian warfare.

  Various secular rituals had been devised to replace church, to fill out the hours and dull the anxiety of the Sabbath, with its muted intimations of mortality: brunch, museums, galleries, and, finally, the family meal of Chinese food in the kitchen.

  “Ashley? Sasha! Goddamn it!”

  Finally relenting, he fetched them from their respective bedrooms. Ashley at her computer, instant-messaging, her head bobbing to whatever was playing on her headphones, and then, startled by the touch of his hand on her shoulder, typing “POMS”—parent over my shoulder—and reluctantly unwiring herself. Sasha was sitting in the lotus position on the master bed, talking on the p
hone, nodding and holding up an index finger. These iterations of domestic life somehow failed to comfort or inspire in him a sense of gratitude for his survival. Returning home on Wednesday evening after walking for two and a half hours, he’d felt a great sense of relief and enjoyed a brief and tearful reunion with his wife and later his daughter. But already that intensity of feeling was fading, replaced by the more familiar sensation that his presence was somewhat superfluous. And being here, so far away from the epicenter, made him feel almost guilty.

  “Please let’s not watch the news,” Sasha said, plucking a spring roll and examining it critically. “I don’t think I can take any more of this right now. And that includes Sixty Minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Ashley said, slouching onto a stool alongside the kitchen counter.

  Luke wasn’t particularly hungry himself, but the idea of the Sunday-night meal—just about the only one they had together, alone in the house without Nellie, the housekeeper off in Brooklyn for the night with her own family—now seemed more important than ever. On the other hand, he had to admit that on Wednesday, Nellie, God bless her, had seemed grateful and overwrought, welcoming him on his return. He picked up a fried dumpling and dipped it in soy sauce. “It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it,” he said. “We just take it all for granted most of the time—phone service, elevators, delivery food….”

  “I was just talking with Sophie Painter,” Sasha said. “They’re moving out to their house on the island and enrolling the kids in Hampton Country Day.”

  “How do you feel?” Luke asked his daughter. “Are you scared about being in the city?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Because that’s an option,” he said. He looked across the counter to gauge Sasha’s reaction, but she wasn’t showing her hand.

  “All my friends are here,” Ashley said.

  “So far they are,” Luke said. “We don’t really know what’s happening or who’s going where yet.” For several months, he’d been entertaining a vague notion of starting over someplace else. Sasha’s resistance had always been the obstacle, but it seemed to him his own restlessness and sense of dissatisfaction had been validated by the current events.

  “At the very least,” Sasha said, “this seems like an awfully good argument for prep school next year.”

  “Or maybe it’s an argument for sticking closer together.” This was an ongoing debate, with Sasha and Ashley on one side and Luke on the other. He wasn’t ready to see his daughter leave home, perhaps because he’d done it himself, so eagerly, and in his mind his departure for prep school marked a gradual, if undramatic, estrangement from his own family. He’d taken Ashley on a tour of New England prep schools over the summer without acceding to the inevitability of the plan.

  “This stuff is swimming in fat,” Ashley said, poking a chopstick into the moo shu pork.

  The note of teenage world-weariness set him off. “Guillermo’s buried under that rubble, for Christ’s sake,” Luke said. “I might’ve been there myself. I should have been there. Who gives a damn about fat?” He didn’t know what to think when he saw the tears welling in her eyes, or how to react when she stood and bolted from the kitchen.

  “For God’s sake, Luke. That girl spent all day Tuesday not knowing whether you were alive or dead. She was beside herself. She thought she’d lost her father. Has it occurred to you that it was hard for us, too? She’s traumatized. We all are. We were worried sick about you.”

  He waited for some physical manifestation of this sentiment, wanting his wife to touch him, embrace him… trying to find it in himself to reach across to her, but the pathways of intimacy were clogged from disuse, stopped up with the debris of old resentments, which these catastrophic events had failed to dislodge. For a brief moment, though, it had seemed that the force of the blast downtown had cleared it all away. They’d fallen into bed on Wednesday and fucked as if their lives depended on it, clinging to each other in the dark. The next morning, she’d discovered the bruises, footprints on his back—apparently he’d been trampled while he was sprawled in the darkness—and she had actually cried.

  Luke now sought out his daughter, who was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling. She turned away when he sat down beside her and stroked her forehead, which, he noticed now, was lightly speckled with nodes of acne—this observation inspiring a fresh wave of guilt and tenderness. She, in fact, had saved his life, however indirectly and unintentionally.

  “I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to blow up like that.”

  “Everything’s falling apart,” she said, sniffling, hiding her face, her amber hair sprayed across the pillow.

  “That’s why we have to stick together.”

  “Okay,” she murmured unconvincingly.

  He wanted to take her in his arms, but he was held back by a sense of her exquisite teenage fastidiousness, her new hypersensitivity to touch and his own awkwardness with her budding womanly form. “What if I read to you?” he said. He tried to remember how many years it had been since he’d done so.

  “I don’t know,” she said, her tone suggesting that she was willing to be persuaded.

  “One of the old stories,” he said, sensing an opportunity, a glimmer of susceptibility to old certainties and the simple pleasures of childhood. When she failed to object, he walked over to her bookshelf, diverted from his quest for a familiar volume by a curiosity that yielded to alarm as he examined some of the strange new titles. When had Gossip Girl, the Vampire Chronicles, and Sex and the City taken their place alongside Stargirl, The Chocolate War, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret?

  Selecting a tatty old standby, he sat down beside her on the bed and started to read: “‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.”

  A snort of recognition issued from the pillow.

  “‘Out to the hoghouse,’ replied Mrs. Arable. ‘Some pigs were born last night.’ ‘I don’t see why he needs an ax,’ continued Fern, who was only eight.”

  Ashley turned to face him. “I always thought of Gran’s farm when we read that. I liked imagining you growing up that way, with all the animals.”

  “Actually, we didn’t move to the farm till I was eight or nine. We lived in town before that.”

  “I wish we went to visit more often. We used to go a lot more.”

  “I’m glad you like my family.”

  “Seems like I like them more than you do.”

  “As if. ”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I mean, you ought to say,” he said, already regretting this schoolmarmish fastidiousness, “‘It seems as if I like them more than you do.’”

  “Whatever. Sometimes I think you’re a little ashamed of them or something.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Well, Mom is.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Right.” Lying back on her pillow, she rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, Dad.”

  “Shall we read a few chapters?”

  “How come you don’t have a southern accent?”

  “I have an accent.” Ah hev an ex sint.

  “A little. You did just then. Not like Uncle Matthew.”

  “Well, darlin’…”

  This elicited a faint smile.

  “Uncle Matthew, now, he’s lived there his whole darned life. I’ve been up north amongst the Yankees more than half my life now.”

  She brushed the hair away from her face to reveal an expression of bemused tolerance, her mouth set in a tight smile intended to be ironic. Luke was careful not to examine her too closely, and when he glanced down at the end of the second chapter, she was asleep, breathing softly through her mouth.

  Cautiously, with a tenuous sense of entitlement, he retreated to the master bedroom; his breakthrough as a father and the memory of Wednesday night awakening a nostalgic chord of warmth for his wife. He found Sasha sitting in front of her vanity in a peach t
eddy, brushing her hair. He watched her examining herself in the mirror, unaware of his presence; her wistful and unguarded expression arousing a certain tenderness commingled with lust. She jumped when he placed his hands on her cool shoulders; he’d almost forgotten the silkiness of her skin. Lowering his face into the fine mist of golden hair, he felt her shoulders tensing against his touch, but he persisted, burrowing into the soft, fragrant skin beneath her ear.

  “Did you talk to Ashley?”

  He nodded. She held the brush in midair with palpable impatience. He took it from her and began to brush her hair from behind.

  She sighed and dropped her arm to her side, tolerating this gesture. “I’m sorry,” she said. “On top of everything else, I’ve got my period.”

  “Since when has that stopped us?” he said, trying to sustain his mood. If anything, it usually made her more passionate, or so he seemed to recall. It could be so simple; if only they could cross that line once more, he imagined he could win her back and even forgive her.

  “I’m just really feeling tense right now.”

  In the face of her resistance, he felt the promptings of a less generous impulse, the desire to ravish and possess her, to reclaim what had once been his. He reached down with his free hand and cupped her breast.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she said, removing his hand.

  Looking at her clenched face in the mirror, he stopped brushing and held out the brush to her, like a general passing his sword to the conquering enemy, a formal gesture of surrender.