The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  “Nobody’s going to be here.”

  Corrine looked at Russell, who seemed to have tuned out of the conversation. “Dad, do you have anything to say about this?”

  “About what?”

  “About Jeremy going to school.”

  “I think, well, I think Jeremy should go to school. I think it’s important to reestablish the routine.”

  “But I don’t want to go.”

  “You have to go,” Storey said, “or else you’ll miss all the lessons and then you’ll get behind and then you won’t get into college.”

  “I don’t want to go to college.”

  “Come on, guys,” Russell said. “We don’t want to be late.”

  “Hey, Dad,” Jeremy blurted, “did all the terrorists die? Because they were on the planes?”

  “Because if they all died, they can’t attack us,” Storey said. “So we should all go to school and don’t worry.”

  “Well, that’s a good point,” Corrine said cautiously. Anything to get them off to school. Time enough to nuance this response later, to hint at the existence of other malevolent souls out there.

  Outside, she hugged them all on the street, trying not to communicate her own sudden sense of dread, sparked by the acrid tang in the air and the sight of a platoon of Guardsmen on the corner of Duane Street.

  “It’s still on fire,” Jeremy said, pointing at the plume of smoke that filled the sky to the south, tilting toward the east.

  “So, Russ, you’ll call Jean and make sure she can get into the city?… Russ?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll be on my cell. And I should finish my shift by four. Wait, do you have your license? And the copy of the lease?”

  He looked blank. “I don’t have the lease.”

  “Russell, for God’s sake, we talked about this.”

  She waited while he went back upstairs, again checking her own purse to make sure she had her driver’s license as well as the second copy of the lease on the apartment, official correspondence showing her residing at this address—they needed this stuff to cross the police barricades, to prove they resided here in the war zone. The license because it had her picture, and the lease because, like most residents of Manhattan, she had a license from her home state, where she hadn’t lived for twenty years, the logistics for getting one in the city being too tedious and grueling. Her Massachusetts license showed the address of her mother’s condo in Lenox, while Russell’s was from Michigan. She’d explained all of this the last couple of days to various out-of-town cops who’d volunteered to take over the secondary and tertiary policing duties of the city. On the thirteenth, she’d had a bitch of a time getting back home after meeting Casey uptown for a drink. The barricades had moved down from Fourteenth Street to Canal in the last day or two, but inside the restricted zone, proof of residence was still required.

  As they waited for Russell, the Levine clan descended from the penthouse with Todd in his Grace Church School uniform. After a dispute about a water leak, the Calloways had gone without speaking to them for more than a year, but in the last few days the animosity had given way to a spirit of wartime camaraderie. Astonishingly, they’d all shared a meal up at the Levines’ that first night, at their request.

  “You guys holding up?” Ray asked, the very image of a downtown ad guy with his salt-and-pepper goatee, black turtleneck, and black jeans.

  “We’re fine,” Corrine said.

  “Any word on your friend?”

  She shook her head. “Not since he rode off on his bike after he saw the first plane hit.”

  “I might have done the same thing,” Ray said, shaking his head solemnly, “if I hadn’t been uptown with a client. Can we walk you up to the border?”

  “We’re just waiting for Russell. He forgot his copy of the lease.”

  “Rebecca forgot hers on Friday. She finally got through by showing her Prozac bottle. It was the only thing in her purse that actually had our address on it.”

  “I could have whipped out my Xanax and my Ambien,” Rebecca said, “but he looked like some farmhand and I didn’t want to blow his mind.” She sold ad space for Cond Nast, apparently a very stressful job.

  “Have you got phone service yet?” Corrine asked, thinking the kids had heard all they needed to about Rebecca’s pharmacopoeia.

  “It was on when we got back last night,” Ray said. “We spent the weekend in Amagansett. I told Rebecca she should stay out there with Todd.”

  “I’m not going to hide,” Rebecca said. “I’m a New Yorker. And so’s my kid.” Indeed, Rebecca had the bluntness as well as the high polish that Corrine had always associated with native New Yorkers—although even she had been deeply shaken and tearful that first night; Corrine was a little sorry to see that she was regaining her tough-girl swagger. Even after twenty years, Corrine thought of herself as something other than a New Yorker, or at least she had until this past week.

  “Well, it’s nice to have the option is all I’m saying,” Ray said.

  “Mom’s feeding the rescuers,” Storey said.

  “What’s this?” Rebecca asked.

  “It’s nothing, really, I’m just doing a shift at this soup kitchen down at Bowling Green.”

  “Oh my God,” said Rebecca. “That is so great.”

  “It’s just a little coffee and doughnut station I heard about.”

  “You must give me the number,” Rebecca said.

  “Rebecca wants to meet a fireman,” Ray said.

  “Have you seen the Bradfords?” Corrine asked, inquiring after their upstairs neighbors.

  “You’ll love this,” Rebecca said. “They checked into the Sherry-Netherland as displaced persons. They’re living it up uptown, room service and Frette sheets changed daily—courtesy of the city.”

  “That’s terrible,” Corrine said. “I mean, it’s not like our building was damaged.”

  “They were going on about the air quality,” Rebecca explained, “but really it’s a paid vacation.”

  “Actually,” Corrine said, “I do wonder about the air.”

  “They used asbestos in the first seventy floors of the south tower,” Rebecca said. “Or maybe it was the north, whatever. Before the law changed. So that’s just part of what we’re breathing down here. And they’re telling us it’s perfectly safe?”

  Jeremy had struck up a conversation with Todd. “Is your school in a skyscraper?” he asked.

  “It’s got four stories,” Todd said. “Dad says it’s the best school downtown by far.”

  “Well, one of the best,” Rebecca said. “There’re lots of good schools in New York.”

  “Is their school good?” Todd demanded.

  Russell finally arrived, his timing better than usual, from Corrine’s point of view. And then something surprising happened, something that made her question her assumptions about the immutability of character just when she had imagined the Levines’ reverting to type; after she’d once again hugged her husband and children good-bye, Ray stepped into the family circle to give her a hug, and then, Rebecca, in her steel gray Dolce & Gabbana two-piece armor, followed suit.

  Flabbergasted, she looked at Russell to get his reaction, but evidently he hadn’t registered this little miracle on Hudson Street.

  “You be careful,” Ray said.

  “Thanks, Ray,” she said. “I will. And you, too.”

  Once all of them had said their good-byes, the Levines headed west to Church Street, while Russell led the kids up Hudson and Corrine walked toward the ghostly plume of gray smoke hanging there in the pale blue sky.

  10

  It had probably been twenty years—years of foie gras with poached pears, curry with mango chutney, and other culinary yin and yang, fat and sweet permutations—since Luke had actually bitten into a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Corrine had thrust one at him, and he was astonished by the sweet, acidic lash of the grape jelly, the gluey peanut butter sticking to the roof of his mouth, the host of emotions and mem
ories this now called up.

  “What’s the matter?” Corrine said.

  “I have this thing where I absolutely have to have the jelly come to the very edge of the bread,” said Karen, the Ralph Lauren girl. “And right to the corners. Every bite has to have jelly.”

  Luke exchanged a look with Corrine, a look referencing the girl’s youth, her sportiness, the bright primary palette of her disposition, but that perhaps said more about the two people who were exchanging it. Corrine was standing beside her at the sandwich station, both of them wearing plastic gloves.

  “I was obsessive about it. Used to drive my mother crazy.”

  “Do you realize,” Corrine said, “that Smucker’s has a patent on the crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

  “No fuckin’ way,” Patrolman Spinetti said. “Excuse my French. That’s like having a friggin’ patent on apple pie.”

  “No, really, they do.”

  This, Luke thought, was just the kind of weird thing Corrine would know, realizing, too, how odd but exhilarating it was that he should think he knew this about her, after just a few days working beside her. But it was true: She was a repository of quirky facts and arcane erudition; this was one of the things he admired about her. The other night, when they went for a walk in Battery Park, she’d told him that a hummingbird’s heart beats a thousand times a minute.

  “I like mine with the peanut butter spread on both slices of the bread,” said a young Guardsman, the squareness of his head accentuated by the flattop cut.

  “Then it would get all over your hands.”

  “No, I mean both pieces on the inside.”

  “It’s a rather disgusting invention, no matter how you make it,” said Yvonne, an angular young Frenchwoman with bright orange hair who had showed up with baguettes and charcuterie. She was slicing the last of the baguettes open; finishing a pile of cigar-shaped sandwiches—jambon, fromage, saucisson.

  “You’re insulting our national dish,” Karen said.

  “I hate to disagree with a beautiful lady,” the square-headed Guardsman said, “but the cheeseburger is our national dish.”

  “Which is why,” Corrine said, “the average American has twenty pounds of undigested meat in his intestines.”

  “That is so gross,” Karen said.

  “You’re all wrong,” Jerry said, holding up a can of Campbell’s condensed chicken noodle soup. “This is it. Our national dish.”

  Once upon a time, these had been the two staples of Luke’s diet—peanut butter and jelly and chicken noodle soup.

  “I tried volunteering for the other soup kitchen, the gourmet one David Bouley started.” These were the first words from Clara, an older woman with a mass of graying hair, black-lacquered nails, and a sour mien, who stood at the coffee machine. “But they said they were fully staffed—unless, I guess, you’re a model or a movie star. I don’t expect they’re serving condensed soup over there.”

  This diet kept transporting Luke back to his childhood—sudden flashbacks of cafeterias and kitchen-counter lunches, comfort food trailing memories that weren’t necessarily as comforting as advertised. The mnemonic power of a simple sandwich. One bite could take him back to a picnic with his mother—a day of riding, the smell of manure and cut grass, the simple joy of possessing her for the day. Buried within the same peanut butter sandwich was a fourth-grade taste of impending doom, when Chuck Johnson, who’d been held back a year and was as big as a teenager, waited for him at the tetherball court while he masticated slowly in the cafeteria, having challenged him to a fight in second period. Chuck had called his father “a nigger lover” because he’d spoken out against the Confederate flag at the courthouse. Luke responded by calling Chuck a Neanderthal, and Chuck didn’t need a dictionary to recognize an insult when he heard one. This exchange ended with Luke lying sprawled on his back, looking up at the tetherball hanging from its pole, gasping for air as his classmates howled and cheered.

  “You know, when you gave me that sandwich,” he told her later, “if I acted strange, it was because it took me back thirty years.”

  They were sitting on the steps of the Customs House, looking back at the glow of the lighted tent: the improvised domestic diorama—women serving and men eating.

  “I had this sudden image of my parents’ kitchen in Tennessee—the avocado green refrigerator, the round pine table, the ladder-back chairs with rush seats. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. I’d skipped school that afternoon. My mother was supposed to be on her volunteer shift at the hospital and my father was away at some conference in Knoxville.”

  In his adolescence, he had come naturally into possession of a secret life, come to covet privacy, to enjoy the freedom of the empty house—the illusion of independence conjoined with the security of home. Not least because it was the safest, most comfortable place to indulge the new imperative of masturbation.

  After hiding his bike behind the house, he told her now, he’d assembled the ingredients of his afternoon repast; Wonder bread, a jar of Skippy and another of Welch’s grape jelly. Leaving a satisfying mess on the counter, he sat down at the table to eat, weighing and ordering his options: He could go directly to his room, dig the Playboy out from its hiding place behind the World Book encyclopedia set, and find instant relief. Or he could prolong the anticipation and start in his parents’ room, explore the treasures of their drawers: his father’s medals from Korea, his mother’s underwear, the little circular rotating calendar with the help of which she practiced the rhythm method. The happy trance of the act that these investigations inspired was interrupted by the sound of car doors in the driveway. He heard his mother’s laughter, then the tap of boots on the flagstone walk.

  “Don’t tell me you were caught in the act?” Corrine said, wincing in sympathetic anxiety.

  He shook his head. He wasn’t sure why he was telling her this, something he’d never even told his wife, except perhaps that she had been more or less responsible for resurrecting the memory.

  “Then I heard another voice that I recognized. It was Duck Cheatham.”

  “Duck?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a southern thing. I had friends called Boo and Bear. Even went to school with a kid named States’ Rights. Duck and his wife were friends of my parents. For a while, they did everything together, including vacations. We always spent Christmas Eve at their house before we all went to midnight Mass at my father’s church. My brother and I hung out with their kids, and everybody used to joke about Mom’s special friendship with Duck. If you were at a cocktail party and wanted my mother, all you had to do was look for Duck, who was a good head taller than most people in the room, and there she’d be. And they rode together all the time, something my dad and Duck’s wife weren’t interested in.”

  Her brow wrinkled in half a dozen folds, and what appeared to be an intense sympathy made him feel justified in sharing the story. He handed her a cigarette from his pack of Marlboro Lights. They’d both started smoking again, a response to stress, a harking back to the uncomplicated pleasures of youth, which was reinforced by the habits of the cops and Guardsmen. A way of punctuating and dividing up the long intervals of waiting and inactivity, it was also a shared habit, a kind of communion. Whatever the initial impulses, this recidivism provided them with a context for loitering and conversation.

  “So there I was with my jeans around my ankles on my mother’s bed.”

  She laughed, expelling two plumes of smoke through her nose. “Sorry, I just suddenly pictured you.”

  “I panicked. Then I pulled myself together and listened. I could hear the murmur of voices downstairs. I thought about retreating to my own room, but I couldn’t, safely anyway, because the floorboards in the hallway would give me away. We lived—my mom still lives—in an old farmhouse, and it’s impossible to sneak around without rousing the dead. So I’m creeping across the floor as stealthily as I can toward the door and trying to decide what to do, when suddenly I hear them on the stairs.”

&nbs
p; “Oh no.”

  “All I can think of is the closet. The door’s partly open, so I slip in and pull it closed behind me.”

  “Oh God.”

  “I heard them come into the room and fall into bed.”

  She took his hand and clutched it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.” But the pressure of her hand and her look of concern seemed justification enough. “I stayed in the closet. Fifteen minutes, half an hour, I don’t really know. Eventually, they got dressed and she walked him downstairs.” She squeezed his hand tighter. “When I heard them outside, I went to my room and climbed out the window, not for the first time, and dropped into the backyard. Then I sneaked through the back pasture and hid in the barn, which, I realized almost immediately, was a bad idea, because Mom practically lived in the barn. She’s a horse person. So I circled the tree line of our neighbor’s pasture and came out on the main road, waited until I saw the bus pass by, and then I walked up the driveway. I didn’t know how I’d be able to face her. I shouted hello from the front door and shot up to my brother’s room. Matthew was already home. When she called us down to dinner, I tried to act as if it had just been another day. But the minute I walked in the kitchen, I remembered the peanut butter and jelly and bread, and there was no sign of any of it. She’d obviously cleaned up. I waited for her to say something, but she never did.”

  “You never talked about it?”

  “God no. Not to her. Not to anyone, really. I hadn’t thought about it in years, not until you handed me that sandwich.”

  “You poor thing. That must have been… Fuck. What happened? Did they keep seeing each other?”

  He shrugged. “There were rumors, of course. I don’t really know for certain. Eventually, Duck went bankrupt and his wife divorced him. Then of course he shot himself.”

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “I don’t know, it’s another southern thing—how you’d expect the story to go. I’m not sure if it ever came out in the open, the thing with my mom. I don’t even know if my father suspected.”