The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  Sasha had once been an ambitious, wide-eyed girl new to the city, a beauty who was determined to be more than an ornament. They’d met at an otherwise-dreary Park Avenue dinner composed of his senior banking colleagues and their shopping wives. One of these was a contributing editor to Vogue—a largely ceremonial title—who’d encountered Sasha when she submitted her annual piece on her favorite stores; an assistant editor in the features department, just two years out of Hollins College, Sasha had been assigned to turn the words on the manuscript page into prose. Rather than get all fuddled on the phone, the woman had invited the young editrix over to her apartment, and if at first she’d looked a little too pretty, after a painless hour in which Sasha had convinced her that the many emendations and excisions of the text were mostly her own ideas, the woman decided she’d discovered a fresh new extra girl for her parties.

  Luke was smitten from the moment he saw her, in a borrowed dress from the wardrobe department. Her perfect features had all the virtues of youth—he hated to admit it now, but her face had acquired character and true beauty only when she hit her thirties—and he found her coquettish manner thoroughly charming. She also had a filthy mouth, and, as he discovered later, she knew how to use it; this seemed to him a brilliant counterpoint to her wholesome southern blondness. And as southerners, they had a language and a culture in common. After having proved to himself that he could hold his own in New York, he couldn’t help feeling comforted and drawn to this gorgeous compatriot.

  Before they sat down to dinner, she’d told him about her quirky girlhood in Charleston, surrounded by eccentric aunts and uncles. Later he was to discover that her father had gambled away his small trust before disappearing when she was three—a fact that allowed him to excuse and sympathize with her ferocious ambition. Her background eventually caught up with her claims for it a few years after they were married, when her mother landed a Florida sugar baron and became a grande dame of Palm Beach, with Sasha the devoted stepdaughter.

  She needn’t have embellished her background for Luke. Far more decisive was her performance when she went home with him that night. Though he’d enjoyed a fairly extensive and varied erotic career up to that point, he had never been quite so thoroughly seduced and ravished. In his bedroom, she seemed more like the star pupil of some fabled seraglio than an art major fresh out of Hollins, an academy for proper southern young ladies. It had taken him many years to come out from under that spell.

  If anything, it was her appetite for the more innocent pleasures, her provincial’s enthusiasm for everything the city had to offer, that had made him love her. She wanted to see and do everything; she dragged him to the ballet, the museums, and the theater. She’d even tried to interest him in jazz, an art form he found formless and annoying. Still, he admired the effort. The few spare hours his job had afforded him previously had been spent in restaurants, at the Racquet Club, and in the artier movie houses that were still a feature of the New York landscape, and he felt grateful to be introduced to the wider wonders of the metropolis.

  When had the dewy sheen of youthful exuberance hardened into the glossy shellac of sophistication? He knew it was partly his fault, being seven years older, with ambitions of his own. The same thing happened, he supposed, to all of the eager boys and girls drawn to the brilliant glow of the city from Charlotte, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh, Pittsfield, and Des Plaines; from Buxton, Kingston, Birmingham, and Bellingham. They gained their citizenship at the expense of their amazement. In the long run, the spectacle and chaotic grandeur of the city, like the sun, were too overwhelming to view with the naked eyes of wonder. They donned their two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, looked straight ahead when they walked down the street. When was the last time that any of them had even looked at those towers at the tip of the island, really? The same thing had happened to Luke, though he retained some of his capacity to be amazed—if only at the rapidity with which Sasha had become the epitome of a certain rarefied type of urban sophisticate, a process no doubt accelerated by her mother’s sudden leap in fortune and social standing. Having once been happy enough to spend holidays with Luke’s family in Tennessee, she suddenly began visiting her mother in Palm Beach and insisting they accompany her and her new husband to Aspen at Christmas.

  He was a willing enough coconspirator in this transformation; he’d encouraged her to join boards and involve herself with charities, until eventually he realized, on the evidence of his massive overdrafts and glimpses of the party pages in glossy magazines, that they were traveling in circles where she was an intimate and he was a guest, the indulgent, if slightly anonymous, husband of the famous beauty. He had to admit that for a long time he’d felt proud to be able to finance this version of the good life.

  Suddenly, she was flying by private jet to parties in Palm Beach while he worked fourteen-hour days. Somewhere in the middle of this transition, Ashley had come along. Sasha had said she wasn’t ready, that she was too young, but he’d finally convinced her. As her husband, and, so far as he knew, the sole recipient of her sexual favors, he was titillated and selfishly flattered when she told him she wanted a cesarean in order to preserve the tone and integrity of the orifice that had given him so many hours of delight, but later he would look back on this as a very inauspicious beginning to family life. Nor, in retrospect, did the other rationale for her preplanned cesarean grant much comfort, especially when she divulged it in clarion tones across a dinner table one evening: “My mother was sixteen hours in labor with me and said it was the most painful thing she’d ever experienced. You think I was going to subject myself to that when I could have a sedative, some intravenous Demerol, and wake up a few hours later with a nice clean incision and a few stitches?”

  Motherhood might have worked. Certainly Ashley’s arrival distracted her and had given them a point of common reference, but he couldn’t help realizing after a few years that the full-time nannies saw more of their daughter than Sasha did. In matters of child rearing, her ideal seemed to be the nineteenth-century English nobility.

  Sasha had objected strenuously to his sabbatical and resented the idea of his becoming a fully engaged parent, as if they were rivals in this field—even though she didn’t especially want to pick Ashley up from school, or take her to museums and movies. What discouraged him even more was that she clearly didn’t understand his desire to find a more satisfying use of his talents and energies. Of course, he’d waited just a little too long to become a full-time husband and father; they both seemed a little bewildered by his sudden availability. Sasha’s busy and glamorous life seldom required his participation, nor did it leave much room for anything else. And now that his daughter had plunged into the choppy waters of adolescence, he found himself watching from the shore, shouting advice that was lost on the winds.

  While he’d made more than enough to weather a couple of years without cutting back too much on their massive expenditures, Sasha confounded him with the pronouncement that you weren’t really rich until you had your own jet.

  He retreated to the library, the ghetto of his masculine prerogative. After Sasha and the decorator had paneled and furnished it in their own interpretation of English men’s club style, he had filled out the bookshelves, which had once graced a Scottish castle, with his own books and bric-a-brac: mementos of his academic, business, and bachelor life, none of which, he realized as he looked around now, had really quite personalized it. The gun rack over the fireplace with his matched sidelock Purdy twenty-gauges and the samurai sword he’d bought back from Tokyo. A collection of tombstones—Lucite slabs commemorating mergers and IPOs—occupied one corner of the leather-topped partners desk; the other was devoted to family photographs in the requisite Tiffany sterling frames: his father in mortarboard and robe on his graduation from Yale Divinity School, his mother on horseback. Somehow, his own family had been segregated here in this one room.

  He dialed his mother’s number in Tennessee, another Sunday-night ritual.

  “I almost called th
is morning,” she said. “I had a terrible dream last night. I dreamt that your phone call Wednesday was a dream. In last night’s dream, when I woke up, I found out that you hadn’t called, and when I called the apartment, Sasha told me you’d died in the towers.”

  “I’ve been having nightmares myself. I keep seeing the face of this woman in the rubble. Except that she didn’t have one. Her face had been burned off. Then suddenly, she has Guillermo’s face. And he’s asking me where I was.”

  “My poor Luke.”

  “Tell me something mundane and bucolic.”

  “Emily Dickinson’s pulled a tendon and that idiot Dr. Reed wanted to put her down.”

  Afterward, swiveling in his Bank of England chair, he caught sight of the biweekly deposit Nellie made of the contents of his pockets before she took the clothes downstairs to be picked up by the dry cleaner: coins, a matchbook from “21”—and a receipt on which was written in perfect Palmer longhand the euphonious name Corrine Calloway above a phone number. That angelic apparition floating above West Broadway, whom, in his delirium, he’d briefly and wishfully imagined as the last woman on earth—or the first.

  “Hello?”

  “Corrine? It’s Luke McGavock. I met you, I think it was on Wednesday, as I was lurching uptown. You were kind enough to hydrate me and more or less reassure me about the continuing existence of life on the planet. I just wanted to thank you.”

  “I should thank you. Your example inspired me. I’ve been volunteering down here the last couple of days.”

  “Down where?” he asked.

  8

  The air was charged as if by the electricity of an imminent storm—by the suspense of the increasingly urgent and unlikely search for the living, by the thick proximity of the dead, by caffeine and the hallucinatory buzz of sleeplessness. The volunteers went about the mundane tasks of food and beverage preparation with a kind of syncopated exigency, animated by the fierce gravitational pull of the black hole several blocks to the north—shouting out to colleagues a few feet away for more sugar packets, more ice, darting between the coffeemaker and the coffee urns, racing a shopping cart full of soft drinks and sandwiches north on Broadway toward the smoking ruins as if in response to imminent famine… or so it seemed to Corrine as she showed Luke around the soup kitchen.

  What is now called Bowling Green, she explained, was the spot where Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhatta from the original inhabitants; later, it was the colony’s first marketplace—where the precursors of Wall Street traders shouted figures in guilders, buying and selling flour, horses, salt pork, sugar, rum, and slaves. All the essentials. Subsequently, the little plot was dedicated to sport and leisure. For a few years, a gilt equestrian statue of George III had stood here, until a drunken Revolutionary mob had ripped it down, stripped off the gold leaf, and melted the rest down for musket balls, “some of which,” she added, “presumably ended up maiming and killing King George’s soldiers.”

  “Are you a historian?” Luke asked at the end of her recitation.

  She felt herself blushing. “I did a little research the other night.”

  Across the street, beyond the U.S. Customs House, Battery Park, its bigger, greener cousin, spread out toward the river. In the seventies, as the massive Twin Towers of the World Trade Center rose a few blocks to the northwest, casting the area into afternoon shadow, the city restored the bedraggled little park, which this week had become the site of one of several improvised relief stations for the rescue operation under way in the wreckage.

  Corrine had discovered the soup kitchen through her friend Casey, who’d gone to the Ralph Lauren boutique to do her bit for the city’s traumatized economy, just as the mayor had advised everyone to do. Her exhausted but exhilarated salesgirl had explained how she had been up all night working at a soup kitchen down at Ground Zero, which conversation Casey had mentioned in passing to Corrine, who called the salesgirl and got the cell-phone number of a guy named Jerry, who’d started the operation—the salesgirl letting it be known that it was only because Casey was such a good customer that she was doing so. Everyone wanted to volunteer, to get close, to work off the shock, to feel useful, to observe the carnage, to help. Corrine had to admit that her own motives were so compound and complex, she could hardly begin to analyze them. Alongside dozens of city agencies, a vast network of private philanthropic organizations was being reconfigured to direct money and energy toward the scene of the attack. After the initial exodus of thousands from downtown, the flow of bodies had been reversed as thousands more had attempted to reach the site, only to be turned away at the police barricades.

  Corrine showed Luke what there was to see of the Bowling Green relief station, an open-fronted tent with a few folding tables and coolers. At the other end of the cobbled square was the police van, headquarters for the men of the Brooklyn South precinct who’d been deployed on the second day to seal the area and enforce security, one of those movie-location vehicles on loan from a production company; and, in fact, at certain moments it seemed to Corrine, though she felt petty for even thinking this, that Bowling Green and the entire zone had the self-conscious air of a movie set, with all the same accoutrements—walkie-talkies, catering tables, muted hysteria. The firemen and the ironworkers were the stars, unapproachable, eyes glazed and fixed on a point in the distance… especially the firemen, and you gave them their space—you didn’t speak to them unless they spoke to you.

  She introduced Luke to Jerry, a hulking, bullet-headed carpenter who looked like Telly Savalas in Kojak. He’d rushed downtown the first day and returned the next day with a coffee urn and a van full of food. He had already explained to Corrine how he had cadged fifty cases of Coca-Cola products from a Brooklyn distributor and traded ten of those to the National Guardsmen occupying Battery Park in exchange for two canvas tents with frames and then swapped ten more to the Salvation Army, which had set up behind the AmEx building, for five cases of Sterno.

  “Luke was working on the pile the first day,” Corrine said, eager to establish that her new friend was not, despite his Bean boots, chinos, and rugby shirt, some Upper East Side dilettante.

  To her surprise, Jerry embraced Luke—engulfed him, really—and thumped him on the back.

  “God bless you, brother. Welcome to our humble operation. We’re trying to do our little bit. We just got this generator this morning.” He pointed to the throbbing two-wheeled contraption out on the cobblestones. “When I first got here, I had to unscrew the base plate on the lamppost to get a power outlet. That’s one of the things you know if you grew up in the city, and you don’t sound like you did, Luke. It’s all about knowing where the juice is. You got to know who to call. Where to go for a generator or a bus or a permit. Where to get a hundred respirators and twenty tanks of propane. In New York, it’s all about knowing how to connect the wires. Now more than ever. You got any drag in city government? Because these bastards from the Parks Department were sniffing around this morning, threatening to evict us.”

  “I know the Parks commissioner,” Luke said. “I could make a call.”

  “The man’s got juice,” Jerry said, throwing a hamlike arm around Corrine. “Where’d you find this fucking guy?”

  “On the street, actually.”

  She felt a strange pride in her new acquaintance, with whom she had a certain tribal sense of identity, affinities of background and education that weren’t supposed to matter anymore, at this leveling moment. But wanting Jerry and the cops and the ironworkers to like her or at least not dislike her or make her feel guilty of some kind of slumming, she wouldn’t dream of bringing certain of her friends around, and for that matter, she didn’t really feel like sharing the experience. But Luke didn’t seem to be blowing her cover.

  “Let me introduce you to my friend, Captain Davies,” Jerry said, nodding toward the big cop ambling across the cobblestones from the command post—who, unlike the volunteers, seemed to evince a kind of professional lassitude, conserving his energy
for a moment of actual crisis—trailed by a patrolman Corrine hadn’t seen before. She liked Davies, with his gruff humility, his stylized, purely formal flirtatiousness. A pink-skinned Brooklynite attached to the Brooklyn South, he cut a wide swath in the cluttered tent, his walkie-talkie and blocky Glock, nightstick and flashlight and cuffs jangling and clanking on his hips. He wasn’t likely to sneak up on a perp, nor to have an easy time making it down the aisle of a bodega. Until a few days ago, the chances of their sharing a cup of coffee together would have been astronomically remote, but by now Corrine knew a great deal about Davies’s family, his boat, and the intricacies and inanities of the NYPD pension plan.

  Luke shook hands with Davies, who introduced the new guy, Spinetti, a young patrolman in his twenties, dark and well built—a body familiar with Nautilus and StairMaster. Both men wore elasticized black ribbons of mourning over their badges.

  “Luke’s been digging,” Jerry told them.

  “A few hours is all,” Luke said.

  “More than I been doing, pal,” Davies said. “I’m just sitting on my ass out here so I can’t take this hero stuff already. I’m coming out of the station house this morning, woman comes up and hugs me. I don’t even know what city I’m in anymore when I wake up in the morning. People coming up on the street and thanking you? They used to spit on us. Sometimes I think I must be in Kansas. If I wanted to live in fuckin’ Kansas, I’d pack up and move.”

  “Personally, I think, you know, it’s nice finally getting some, whatever, respect,” Patrolman Spinetti said tentatively, as if disagreeing with the captain was to go out on a limb.

  “When the shit came down,” Jerry said, “you guys responded to the call.”

  Davies shrugged. “I hate to tell you, but I was sleeping in that morning.”

  “In some ways, it’s been great this week,” the patrolman said. “The radio’s almost silent. No calls. No gang fights, no domestics, no stickups. Like even the punks are in shock.”