The Good Life

by Jay McInerney

  At Lexington, they climbed out of the cab and walked down toward the Armory. Hundreds of solemn pedestrians milled on the sidewalk, viewing the makeshift gallery that had sprung up on the walls of the curry houses and the lampposts on either side of the avenue—the faces of the missing glancing back hopefully and artlessly in photographs taken at weddings and graduation ceremonies, now hanging above impromptu shrines of flowers and candles.

  By now, though, this fiction of the missing was becoming harder to sustain. These people were missing in the most radical sense. They weren’t wandering around the streets. He had seen that rubble, walked on it… his throat constricting and eyes welling all over again as he moved now with Corrine through the crowd, looking at the names and faces on the posters. The posters were not really queries so much as memorials—simulacra for bodies that would never be found, for the corpses that would never be viewed in open coffins before being laid to rest in consecrated ground. MISSING… Two earrings in left ear… pinstriped suit with yellow tie and pocket square… lightly freckled… tongue stud… silver wedding ring… crescent-shaped scar on right calf… birthmark the shape of Puerto Rico on left arm… ankle bracelet… tattoo of the Grim Reaper on upper right arm. In one photo, a middle-aged man stood next to an elephant.

  Beneath a picture of a fireman: Last seen on Channel 7 News clip Tues 9/11. Clip filmed at St. Vincent’s Hospital. He was treated and most likely returned to Ground Zero.

  Tears were streaming down the face of the man standing on the sidewalk in front of this poster, a muscular Hispanic man in a double-breasted mohair suit, who looked at Corrine and said, “It’s my son.”

  “You got to believe,” said his companion, a dark pretty woman with stunning brown eyes.

  A pockmarked boy with a scraggy ponytail and four tiny rings in his right ear leaned against the wall of the Armory, holding his dog on a leash, a sign hanging from his neck: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO PET MY DOG. IT MAY MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER.

  The pretty Hispanic woman was now hugging the father as he wept inconsolably. “They’ll find him. He’s coming back to you. You must believe.”

  Up ahead, some kind of disturbance—a black man in short dreads locked in a strange embrace with a white guy.

  “They’re dead,” he shouted as the other man struggled to hold him. “What’s the matter with you people? They’re fucking gone. They’re already cremated, crushed and incinerated like garbage, and we won’t even have a fucking bone to bury. It doesn’t have to make sense. People die. People in the Middle East get blown apart every day and we read about it in the New York fucking Times or the Post while we’re sitting at Starbucks drinking our white-chocolate mocha.”

  The white guy himself looked wild with grief. “It’s okay, man.”

  “It’s not okay. My mother died a nasty, horrible death, leaking out of every orifice. Was that fair? Did that make sense? Did I make a fucking poster?”

  A space had opened around them, ringed with solemn spectators sharing an expression of mournful indulgence. You might have expected someone to register outrage or censure, to hit him or tell him he was full of shit. But these people had already seen hundreds of permutations of grief over the past fortnight.

  Finally, carried along with the crowd, they arrived at the door of the Armory, where a stocky black cop intoned, “Families only. Families only beyond this point.”

  Luke tried to speak. Corrine clutched his hand and gave him a look of encouragement. He cleared his throat, reached into her shoulder bag, and held up the hairbrush and the toothbrush for the cop to see.

  16

  When she moved to the city, no matter how hard she’d worked that day or how little she’d slept the previous night, Corrine always felt her pulse quickening as darkness fell and the walls and cubicles of office life dissolved and anything seemed possible as the disparate workday tribes spilled into the streets and the bars and restaurants to mingle and preen, to boast and hunt.

  Night beckoned—friends calling, and friends yet to be made. She dreamed of the chance encounter or conversation that would reveal what she really wanted to do with her life, of meeting the stranger who would be what she wanted to do with her life. That brief season—her first year after Brown, when Russell was studying at Oxford and she was a single girl in the undiscovered and boundless city. Even after they’d married, she felt the electricity and promise of the Manhattan twilight into which they plunged as a couple, Russell’s golden Labrador expression—you could almost imagine the wagging tail—ever expectant about the restaurant, movie, or play, the concert, gallery opening, or book party. It was a collision of friends, for in those days parties were not organized so much around specific occasions or the promotion of a product as they were a function of irrepressible conviviality.

  For several years, her motherly duties had left her with a deficit of nocturnal energy and curiosity about the world outside the walls of her loft, her yearning having been incarnated in the flesh of her children, not that she didn’t sometimes remember and miss the sense of anticipation out there. But more often, she felt anxious about the lures and snares that her husband might encounter between office and home, the beautiful women in restaurants, at bookstore readings and screenings, at the parties he claimed he needed to attend. She herself was very happy to be in bed by 10:30 with a novel or biography. Now, however, like someone whose house has been broken into and ransacked, she was feeling wounded and vulnerable. Her initial desire to flee the city, clutching her babies, had partially subsided as she’d felt herself drawn beyond the barricades by an impulse no less compulsive than the old restlessness. She felt strangely at home at Bowling Green, near the epicenter of the trauma that had ruined their sleep and clouded their dreams.

  A schedule had taken shape at the relief station—eight to four, four to midnight, midnight to eight. Jerry had set up a work roster on a clipboard. He directed them at their tasks, sent them out on scavenging missions, found a job for everyone. He was one of the men who had risen to the moment while others remained dazed and helpless, gaping at their television screens. As long as he was focused on the logistics of relief, he seemed to have an answer to every question. Then there was Luke. Like her, he seemed compelled to spend his waking hours at Bowling Green, to have found the simple chores of the soup kitchen to answer some profound need. The kids were asleep, and somehow the zone was more alive in the dark hours, the work she was doing more urgent, the sense of isolation and containment more complete. Then it was truly a world apart.

  They also serve who only stand and wait. What was that from? Russell would know. She’d meant to ask him last night but had stopped short, seeing his vacant look as he sat in front of the television, watching the news. At first, she’d imagined that if nothing else, this thing would draw them together as a couple, as a family; that had seemed the only possible good that could come out of it. But after the first spate of phone calls, when they’d found each other and gotten the kids from school and absorbed the initial shock of disbelief, he’d become, if anything, more withdrawn.

  Even before the eleventh, long before the eleventh, he had been growing increasingly preoccupied and short-tempered, and now she’d have to repeat a question three or four times before she got his attention, which was probably, she had to admit, another reason she was drawn to the night shift. Her conversations with Luke were more engaging than any she’d had with Russell in years. Of course, she realized it was a kind of wartime intimacy, the camaraderie of strangers in a lifeboat, but it underlined how distant from Russell she’d felt these last few months. Hell, years.

  It was exhilarating, too, behind the barricades, flirting with the cops and the Guardsmen—that old frisson between men and women. “That’s part of your job,” Jerry had told her. “I had a girl come up the other day and apologize that she was still wearing makeup from her job, like it was frivolous or something, and I told her, ‘Hell, smear it on. Put on that lipstick, babe.’ These guys need a little cheering up. Why the hell do you think
we discourage male volunteers?”

  New volunteers continued to arrive, sometimes far more than were needed, especially in the daytime, which was another reason she preferred the late-night shift. Tonight, though, seven of them had showed up for the midnight shift, and she’d felt slightly resentful. Katie, a pretty little ponytailed hippie girl from Brooklyn, had immediately claimed the coffeemaker, the center of the operation, where everyone was living on caffeine. A cranky piece of machinery dating back to the Lindsay administration, it heated slowly, and overflowed frequently, requiring constant attention and fifteen minutes to run through its groaning cycle, the coffee then transferred to insulated plastic urns, which always seemed to be running perilously low.

  She and Katie exchanged little bits of their lives over coffee in the predawn hours. She was, of all things, an herb gardener in Prospect Park and quickly announced her desire not to work with meat products, if possible. She seemed an unlikely New Yorker, with her sweet chipmunk face and Heidi braids, someone who should be living in Colorado Springs or one of the Portlands. She’d made up little sachets of essential oils, peppermint and lavender, that she handed out to anyone with a mask or a respirator as a prophylactic against the smell, the stench that Russell complained permeated her clothes and her hair and her skin.

  Corrine checked the sandwich station, which was looking somewhat depleted, and started digging through the boxes of supplies for peanut butter and jelly and generic white bread, taking a young actor with complicated hair and multiple earrings as her apprentice. She found plastic packages of presliced ham and salami, as well as a huge block of yellow cheese, in one of the coolers and had Nico hack off slices of cheese with one of the dull knives scavenged from God knows where, while she laid out an assembly line of open-faced bread and ham.

  The others skulked around like new kids in a school yard, all with a quietly desperate air of wanting to look occupied, not quite sure whom to report to or how to make themselves useful, until finally Jerry drifted over from the police van, exuding an air of significant exhaustion, looking to Corrine as if he hadn’t slept since she last saw him, sixteen hours before. He paused in front of the open tents and surveyed his troops, then waved to Corrine, his gait like that of a man trying to keep his balance on a storm-tossed deck as he approached her table.

  She told him that Russell had talked to his chef friend Carlo Monsanto, who would have fifty pasta dinners ready for pickup in the afternoon.

  “You’re a star,” Jerry said. He turned then to address the newcomers, eagerly awaiting their instructions as Corrine herself had not long ago. “Anybody with cooking experience here?”

  Two hands went up, a young man in an NYU sweatshirt and a white-haired woman who looked like Grace Paley.

  “Because you won’t be needing it here,” he said.

  Jerry set them to opening the cans of chicken noodle soup, adding bottled water, and heating the large pots; loading the coolers with soft drinks; collecting and bagging the empty cans and bottles.

  Three Guardsmen in brand-new camo outfits came in for coffee, followed shortly by a couple of sanitation workers. The Guardsmen were griping about the fact that their guns were locked up in the park—some agreement between the city and the federal authorities.

  “What if something did happen?” said a chubby corporal. “It’s like showing up at a gunfight with a knife.”

  “You’ll have your gun soon enough,” his sergeant said, “when they send you overseas to fight the towelheads.”

  Jerry sat down with two transit cops, one of whom said that if any of the subway tunnels under the rivers gave way, the water could flood the system all the way up to Harlem.

  Jerry disappeared for half an hour and eventually reappeared with Luke, driving his SUV up onto the cobblestones and parking by the tents. They unloaded a gas grill and some propane from the back and set it up in an unoccupied corner, and before long all the male volunteers, Guardsmen, and cops drifted over to check out this new piece of equipment and to offer advice about its operation. Within minutes, the smell of grilled meat filled the tent. The smell of burning fat, after an hour of working with slimy cold cuts and smearing peanut butter and jelly on bread, was making her nauseated, and Corrine knew she’d lose it if she didn’t get some air.

  A few minutes later, Luke joined her on her bench across the street. “Are you all right? You kind of bolted just then.”

  “Just felt a little queasy,” she said. “I used to have issues with food. Suddenly, it was like it was all coming back to me. After lo these many years.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” He shook a cigarette out of his pack and lit it with his Bic. “I just had another little time warp myself, smelling those burgers on the grill,” he said. “Fourth of July, big cookout with my girlfriend’s family at Henderson Lake. I was fifteen. Hot dogs and burgers and chicken on the grill at their summer house. It had been a very big deal, my spending Fourth of July weekend with them and not with my own family and because we had this tacit agreement—my girlfriend and I, that is—that we were going to do it that night. And then this buzz spread through the clan, the adults whispering to one another, a sudden sense of alarm communicating itself to the kids. Someone started banging on the door of an upstairs bedroom. Finally, they got a ladder from somewhere, put it up against the side of the house while the women herded the children to the front yard. Joanie’s father went up the ladder and climbed in a second-floor window. Her aunt had killed herself, her unmarried aunt Eileen, slit her wrists in the bathtub while we were throwing a football and laughing in the yard, waiting for our burgers. That was the first death I really remember, that made any impression on me, even though I barely knew the woman. I’ve been to lots of cookouts since then, but I haven’t thought of that in years.” He paused and took a drag from his cigarette. “Not exactly a food issue, I guess. Still, all sorts of weird memories seem to have been churned up lately.”

  As soon as he said this, she felt it was true. Odd fragments of the past had been suddenly uncovered, jutting above the surface like fossils revealed by an earthquake.

  “I guess you didn’t get lucky that night,” she said.

  “Actually, I did. I hate to say it, sounds terrible, but I remember realizing at the time that it worked in my favor. She dragged me into the cabana shortly after the police arrived. I had nothing to compare it to at the time, but the proximity of death seemed to, I don’t know, turbocharge the sex.”

  “There are probably thousands of people having sex all over the city right now. Clutching one another, reaching out for a stranger. I mean, more than usual.” She suddenly felt awkward, worried that he would think she was being flirtatious or suggestive, which she hadn’t meant to be—even as she experienced an unexpected intimacy with this attractive man.

  He nodded in a distracted way, looking out over Battery Park, and she wondered whom he was thinking about—not the long-lost girlfriend, she suspected.

  “So what about these food issues? If you don’t mind my asking. Seems like we ought to know if you’re a poisoner or a radical fruitarian.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s better if I talk about it, actually.”

  “I was just about to take a walk up Broadway,” he said.

  “I think they can spare me for a few minutes.” She followed him around the edge of the park, past the raised butt of the fat bronze bull she’d once posed beside after getting hired as an analyst at Merrill. Still poised to charge up Broadway, it pointed its huge head toward Wall Street, that narrow chute between office facades a couple blocks away. “I used to work over there,” she said, pointing to an office building on the north side of the street.

  “We were practically neighbors,” he said. “I used to work at Morgan. We could’ve passed each other on the street.”

  “It was a long time ago,” she said, “another lifetime, the bull market of the eighties. Even though I never really felt like I belonged, there were moments riding that wave when I could almost s
uspend my disbelief. Then it all came crashing down. Not like this, of course, but the crash of ’87 seemed, I don’t know, cataclysmic at the time.”

  “I remember.”

  “Personally, it was a real disaster.”

  “Personally is maybe the only perspective we have.”

  “My… Russell…” Why, she wondered, had she hesitated over the word?

  “Your husband.”

  “My husband was on the verge of engineering this leveraged buyout of the publishing house he worked for. It was crazy. He was an editor, making like thirty thousand a year, and suddenly he’s maxed out our credit cards and got Bernie Melman as a partner.”

  “Bernie Melman?”

  “You know him?”

  “Friend of my wife’s.”

  Something in his expression made her pause.

  “I think he’s sleeping with my wife, actually.”

  “You think?” She felt a strange sympathetic thrill at this intimation.

  “I’m not sure exactly how far it’s progressed. Far enough that it’s a topic of conversation in our overheated little zip code. Far enough that I think he’s been having me followed. Kind of ridiculous, isn’t it—the illicit suitor having the husband trailed by private detectives? But that’s his style. He’s always gone in for a certain amount of corporate espionage, and I guess he has to keep his staff busy.”

  “Why would he have you followed?”